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Journal Article 1: Savitsky, D. (2012). Is plea bargaining a rational choice? Plea bargaining as an engine of racial stratification and overcrowding in the United States prison system. Rationality and Society, 24, 131–167.

Abstract: The United States incarcerates 1% of American adults. Incarceration rates have increased steadily since 1970 even while criminal activity has dropped. Additionally, while crime rates are relatively equal across races, the rate of incarceration for blacks has risen faster than for whites. This paper argues that plea bargaining, which accounts for 95% of criminal dispositions, is a major causal factor of high prison populations and high levels of racial stratification in prisons. This paper hypothesizes that by placing defendants in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, and by reducing transaction costs, plea bargaining allows prosecutors to act on a political will to incarcerate large numbers of people. Additionally, it hypothesizes that since black defendants are likely to have less faith in the criminal justice system than white defendants, this places them in a worse bargaining position, leading to systematically worse bargains. These differential bargains aggregate into a stratified prison population.

Journal Article 2: Zalman, M. (2017). Wrongful convictions and the innocence movement. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 33, 4–7.

Abstract: Little more than a decade ago, a Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice special issue, devoted to “Miscarriages of Justice,” was edited by capital punishment scholar Robert Bohm (2005). Bohm noted that the subject “had not received much scholarly attention from social scientists and especially criminologists.” Articles in the issue shed light on a theory of prosecutorial misconduct (Schoenfeld, 2005), on wrongful convictions in Canada (Denov & Campbell, 2005), and on restorative justice and wrongful capital convictions (Barnett, 2005). But the article that illuminated the history and morphology of wrongful conviction scholarship, helped define the contours of an academic specialty, and laid down a challenge to the crime disciplines was Richard Leo’s (2005) “Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice: Developing a Criminology of Wrongful Conviction.” His lead article took criminologists to task for not engaging in wrongful conviction research at a time that psychological and legal studies focusing on actual innocence were burgeoning, while explaining the daunting obstacles in gathering wrongful conviction data for social scientific analysis. Leo’s article clarified a sprawling subject for all readers. It goaded scholars already analyzing issues related to wrongful convictions to redouble their efforts, and for some criminal justice scholars and criminologists, including me, inspired them to study a field that was not entirely defined (Zalman, 2006).