Electing "tough on crime" prosecutors actually leads to a 6.6% drop in deaths among young men.
SSRN · March 13, 2026 · 6304441
Why it matters
While strict prosecution is often linked to negative social outcomes, this study found it significantly reduced firearm homicides and suicides. Surprisingly, the majority of this effect came from higher conviction rates reducing firearm access rather than just prison-based incapacitation.
From the abstract
<span>Legal scholars argue that local prosecutors may be the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system, yet there is a limited understanding of how different prosecutorial approaches shape community level outcomes. This paper investigates the causal relationship between approaches taken by local criminal prosecutors</span><span>—</span><span>also called district attorneys</span><span>—</span><span>and community-level mortality rates. We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in prosecu