Discretion as Reform? Evaluating the Punitiveness and Racial Equity Effects of Progressive Prosecution in Florida Open Access
Brubaker, Elizabeth (Spring 2026)
Abstract
Progressive chief prosecutors (PCPs) are often viewed as a response to the punitive policies that fueled mass incarceration, using discretion to expand diversion, decline low-level charges, and reduce punishment severity. This study asks whether PCP elections reduce racial disparities and punitiveness in criminal case outcomes. Using administrative felony court records from all Florida judicial circuits (2018–2025; N ≈ 904,000 cases), I construct statute-weighted circuit–year measures of diversion, conviction, and sentencing outcomes, combining descriptive trends, two-way fixed-effects models, and case studies of two executive PCP removals.
PCP leadership is descriptively associated with higher pre-trial diversion, while conviction rates and sentencing show no consistent directional change. Fixed-effects models find no statistically significant effect of PCP presence on racial outcome gaps. However, PCP removal is associated with a significant worsening of racial sentencing disparities (4.45 additional months for nonwhite relative to white defendants), suggesting PCPs function less as engines of reform and more as constraints on regression. Overall, the election of a progressive prosecutor appears to operate less as a standardized reform and more as a locally contingent experiment, indicating that discretion alone may have limited capacity to substantially reduce entrenched racial inequities in the criminal legal system.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Mass Incarceration, Racial Disparities, and the Role of the Prosecutor……………….….3
The Emergence of the Progressive Prosecutor……………………………………………5
Prior Empirical Studies and Research Gap………………………………………….…….8
Theory: Prosecutorial Discretion as a Tool for Reform…………………………………....…….10
Florida Context………………………………………………………………….….……14
Methods…………………………………………………………………………………….…….15
Data Sources and Sample Construction………………………………………….…..…..15
Circuit Heterogeneity………………………………………………………………….…17
Independent Variable: Progressive Prosecutor Leadership……………………………...18
Dependent Variables...…………………………………………………………………...22
Unit of Analysis and Aggregation Strategy……………………………………………...23
Control Variables………………………………………………………………………...24
Data Limitations………………………………………………………………………….24
Analysis…………………………………………………………………………………..26
Results……………………………………………………………………………………………27
Statewide Punitiveness Patterns in Diversion, Conviction, and Sentencing………..…...27
Racial Disparities in Outcomes…………………………………………………………..33
Two-Way Fixed Effects Model Estimates……………………………………………….39
Case Studies: Removal of a PCP………………………………………………………...41
Discussion………………………………………………………………………………………..46
Limitations……………………………………………………………………………….51
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….53
References………………………………………………………………………………………..57
Appendix A………………………………………………………………………………………61
Appendix B……………………………………………………………………………...……….62
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