By Roderic Broadhurst, Matthew Ball, Chuxuan Jiang, Joy Wang and Harshit Trivedi

Opioids, including the highly potent synthetic opioids fentanyl and carfentanil, are commonly sold on illicit cryptomarkets or Tor darknet markets. Data collected throughout 2019 from 12 large darknet markets that sold opioids enabled observation of the impact of law enforcement seizures and voluntary or scam market closures on the availability of fentanyl and other opioids.

Trends in opioid and fentanyl availability before and after law enforcement interventions indicate whether market operators and sellers are deterred and whether market closures lead to displacement, dispersal or substitution. Evidence of all of these outcomes was present in both descriptive and trend analyses, although most effects were short lived. Market closures, especially law enforcement seizures, reduced the availability of opioids, in particular fentanyl, as well as increasing prices and displacing vendors to other markets. Market closures also led vendors to substitute fentanyl for other opioids or other illicit drugs.

Research Report no. 18. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2021. 73p.

By Daniel A. Sumner | Robin S. Goldstein

• Under US federal law, weed, also known as “marijuana” or “cannabis,” remains a Schedule I illegal narcotic, in the same category as cocaine and heroin. Production and sale of weed are federal felonies punishable by severe prison terms.

• Individual US states, in conflict with federal law, began legalizing medical weed in 1996. However, in the past decade, the US Department of Justice has agreed not to enforce federal criminal weed laws against anyone who is following state laws.

• As of 2022, 33 percent of all Americans live in states with legal recreational sales of weed, 41 percent live in states with medical legalization but no legal recreational sale, and 26 percent live in states with total weed prohibitions.

• In its early years, legally produced and sold weed has struggled to capture market share. In most places where the sale and use of weed are now legal, illegal weed—unlicensed, unregulated, and untaxed—still has a dominant market share and shows no signs of fading away.

Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2022. 7p.

By Roman Gabriel Rivera

There is growing demand for reforms to the U.S. criminal justice system. Nevertheless, there are significant questions and relatively few answers. This dissertation studies multiple U.S. criminal justice system issues using detailed administrative data from Cook County, Illinois: Does policing the police increase crime? Does the composition of a police officer's academy cohort influence their future outcomes? Is pretrial electronic monitoring an attractive alternative to pretrial release and detention? To answer these questions, I use administrative data from Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, on the Chicago Police Department, Cook County Jail, and Circuit Court of Cook County, and a range of econometric methods.

In Chapter 1, I study the effect of pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative to pretrial release and pretrial detention (jail) in Cook County, Illinois. EM often involves a defendant wearing an electronic ankle bracelet that tracks their movement and aims to deter pretrial misconduct. Using the quasi-random assignment of bond court judges, I estimate the effect of EM versus release and EM versus detention on pretrial misconduct, case outcomes, and future recidivism. I develop a novel method for the semiparametric estimation of marginal treatment effects in ordered choice environments, with which I construct relevant treatment effects. Relative to release, EM increases new cases pretrial due to bond violations while reducing new cases for low-level crimes and failures to appear in court. Relative to detention, EM increases low-level pretrial misconduct but improves defendant case outcomes and reduces cost-weighted future recidivism. Finally, I bound EM's pretrial crime reduction effect. I find that EM is likely an adequate substitute for pretrial detention. However, it is unclear that EM prevents enough high-cost crime to justify its use relative to release, particularly for defendants who are more likely to be released.

Chapter 3, joint with Bocar Ba, studies and differentiates between the effects of oversight and outrage on policing. Previous studies estimating the impact of police oversight on crime rely on major policing scandals as shocks to examine the impact of oversight on crime. We argue that the simultaneous effect of public outrage on officer behavior and crime contaminates these results, and we provide a conceptual framework that distinguishes between oversight and outrage. We identify two events relating to unexpected court rulings in Chicago that increased oversight and caused a decline in reported misconduct but had virtually no public reaction. Despite the decrease in reported misconduct, crime and officer activity were unaffected. We contrast this with a major policing scandal, after which we find both a rise in crime rates without an equivalent increase in arrests and a decline in officer stops and use of force. Our results suggest that police oversight can reduce misconduct without increasing crime.

New York: Columbia University, 2023. 299p.