Dimensions of Prosecutor Decisions: Revealing Hidden Factors with Correspondence Analysis

Despite the significant impact of prosecutorial discretion on criminal justice outcomes, there are very few large-scale studies of state and local prosecutor decision-making. Our previous empirical research demonstrated that a defendant’s race and class do not affect prosecutorial charging decisions and revealed a gap in the literature about factors that do influence prosecutorial charging decisions and sentencing recommendations. Accordingly, we designed a study to obtain more information about prosecutor discretion and decision-making. Over 500 prosecutors from across the United States completed our vignette-based experiment and survey, which produced quantitative and qualitative data. We transformed these data to use Correspondence Analysis (CA), an empirical method that allowed us to identify associations between prosecutors’ charging decisions and sentencing recommendations for a hypothetical defendant and the prosecutors’ individual characteristics, office and jurisdiction characteristics, and the factors they described as important to their decision-making. Our analysis shows two dimensions of prosecutor decisions—Punitive vs. Therapeutic Sentence and Most Severe Criminal Record vs. Least Severe Criminal Record—and we mapped the prosecutor decisions onto these dimensions. Our results also reveal factors associated with prosecutor decisions about charges and whether to (i) defer prosecution or suspend sentences, (ii) recommend a monetary penalty, (iii) recommend a term of confinement, or (iv) seek alternative sentences, and we discuss these findings in the context of effects on recidivism.