Make or Buy? The Provision of Indigent Defense Services in the United States
研究美国贫困被告的辩护服务提供方式，发现公共辩护人相比私人指定律师能降低22%的入狱概率和10%的刑期长度，对法律政策制定者有参考价值。
Abstract Most criminal defendants cannot afford to hire an attorney. To provide constitutionally mandated legal services, states commonly use either private court-appointed attorneys or a public defender organization. This paper investigates the relative efficacy of these two modes of indigent defense by comparing outcomes of codefendants assigned to different types of attorneys within the same case. Using data from San Francisco, I show that in multiple defendant cases, public defender assignment is plausibly as good as random. I find that public defenders reduce the probability of any prison sentence by 22% and the length of prison sentences by 10%.