Community interventions in the administration of justice

Abstract

In theory, the administration of criminal justice is state business: Defendants are arrested, tried, and punished by state agents. In reality, citizens often attempt to intervene in this process—for example, by imposing their own punishments in lieu of, or in addition to, state penalties. We build a game-theoretic model to investigate how such behavior affects state justice provision. Illustrating our results with examples from, inter alia, the Jim Crow South, we show that community intervention warps both court procedures and the mapping between court attitudes and court decisions: Relative to a baseline without interference, it can lead courts to under- or over-convict, and can disrupt court incentives to use or acquire information at trial. More broadly, the threat of community interference can distort the behavior of all actors in the criminal justice system—and neither courts themselves nor other state actors may be able to mitigate these distortions.