Law Enforcement Leadership, Tenure & Jail Overcrowding

Calls for criminal justice reform have become commonplace, as issues ranging from ethnic and racial bias in policing to prison overcrowding have taken center stage in many policy discussions. The demand for change in the criminal justice system largely falls on the shoulders of leadership within the criminal justice system who might have their own preferences toward criminal justice reform. In this work we examine the issue of sheriff tenure on jail occupancy rates, as jails are directly managed by the sheriff and capacity issues in jails have resulted in not only safety and security problems for inmates and staff, but also fiscal stress. Utilizing a unique institutional feature - that 192 county sheriffs are limited to no more than two terms in the position - we employ an instrumental variable identification strategy to examine the impact of sheriff tenure on jail occupancy rates. Our results show that longer sheriff tenure is associated with higher jail occupancy rates. Exploring heterogeneous effects we find that politically competitive Democratic and politically uncompetitive Republican counties are the largest contributing group to our main effect. This work sheds insights into the agencies that are contributing to higher jail occupancy rates, as well as the conditions that are fertile for jail overcrowding