Anne Morrison Piehl                                               

    Professor, Department of Economics
    Director, Program in Criminal Justice
    Rutgers University
    75 Hamilton Street
    New Brunswick, NJ 08901
    (848) 932-8653
    apiehl at economics dot rutgers dot edu                                                                                                                                

Curriculum vita:

•  Click here for a copy of my CV.

Links to some of my recent research:

• Sentencing Guidelines and Judicial Discretion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Human Calculation Errors (with Shawn Bushway and Emily Owens). There is a debate about whether advisory non-binding sentencing guidelines affect the sentences outcomes of individuals convicted in jurisdictions with this sentencing framework. Identifying the impact of sentencing guidelines is a difficult empirical problem because court actors may have preferences for
  sentencing severity that are correlated with the preferences that are outlined in the guidelines. But, in Maryland, ten percent of the recommended sentences computed in the guideline worksheets contain calculation errors. We use this unique source of quasi-experimental variation to quantify the extent
  to which sentencing guidelines influence policy outcomes.  Among drug offenses, we find that the direct impact of the guidelines is roughly ½ the size of the overall correlation between recommendations and outcomes.  For violent offenses, we find the same ½ discount for sentence recommendations that are higher than they should have been, but more responsiveness to recommendations that are too low.   We find no evidence that the guidelines themselves directly affect discretion for property offenders, perhaps because judges generally have substantial experience with property cases and therefore do not rely on the errant information.  Sentences are more sensitive to both accurate and inaccurate recommendations for crimes that occur less frequently and have more complicated sentencing.  This suggests that when the court has more experience, the recommendations have less influence.  More tentative findings suggest that, further down the decision chain, parole boards counteract the remaining influence of the guidelines.
• Immigration and Crime in Early 20th Century America (with Carolyn Moehling).  We find that a century ago immigrants may have been slightly more likely than natives to be involved in crime.  Aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data meant that analysts at the time missed important features of the immigrant-native incarceration comparison, especially because the closing of the borders in the 1920s meant that immigrants were increasingly older than natives and, consequently, less prone to crime.  Our analyses control carefully for age, and show that prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity in 1904, but by 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older.
• Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration, Cambridge University Press, 2008. 

• Preparing Prisoners for Employment: The Power of Small Rewards (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Civic Report no. 57, May 2009) This report describes a prisoner reentry program in Montgomery County, Maryland.  At release, nearly 90% are employed.  The paper argues that the behavioral techniques employed by this Pre-release Center can be adapted by other reentry programs or parole agencies to improve inmate accountability and attach inmates to the legitimate labor market.

Last revision of this page: 11/14/2012