Aharoni Eyal, Kleider-Offutt Heather M, Brosnan Sarah F
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, United States.
Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Nov 12;12:778293. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.778293. eCollection 2021.
Prosecutors can influence judges' sentencing decisions by the sentencing recommendations they make-but prosecutors are insulated from the costs of those sentences, which critics have described as a correctional "free lunch." In a nationally distributed survey experiment, we show that when a sample of (=178) professional prosecutors were insulated from sentencing cost information, their prison sentence recommendations were nearly one-third lengthier than sentences rendered following exposure to direct cost information. Exposure to a fiscally equivalent benefit of incarceration did not impact sentencing recommendations, as predicted. This pattern suggests that prosecutors implicitly value incorporating sentencing costs but selectively neglect them unless they are made explicit. These findings highlight a likely but previously unrecognized contributor to mass incarceration and identify a potential way to remediate it.
检察官可以通过他们提出的量刑建议来影响法官的量刑决定——但检察官无需承担这些刑罚的成本，批评者将此形容为一种惩教方面的“免费午餐”。在一项全国性的调查实验中，我们发现，当抽取的178名专业检察官样本被屏蔽量刑成本信息时，他们建议的监禁刑期比在接触到直接成本信息后做出的刑期长近三分之一。正如预期的那样，接触到在财政上等同于监禁的收益并不会影响量刑建议。这种模式表明，检察官在隐含层面重视纳入量刑成本，但除非明确提及，否则会有选择地忽略它们。这些发现凸显了大规模监禁一个可能但此前未被认识到的促成因素，并确定了一种可能的补救方法。
