Prosecutorial Reforms and Challenges (Essay Sample)

Prosecutorial Reforms and Challenges
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Prosecutorial Reforms and Challenges
Prosecutors wield considerable influence because they determine whether to bring charges, whether to seek pretrial custody or cash bail, and how the plea-bargaining process is conducted. They also influence sentencing, determining whether or not criminals will be imprisoned and for how long. These lawyers play an important role in the evolution of the criminal justice system, with 94 federal prosecutors and over 2,400 state, county, and municipal prosecutors. They are to blame for the epidemic of mass incarceration that is ravaging the United States in a number of ways, exacerbated by punitive policies that encourage individuals to serve time in prison.
Recruiting and keeping experienced and diverse prosecutors, as well as processing, preserving, and exploiting huge volumes of evidence created by contemporary technology, are all issues and obligations that state and municipal prosecutors confront. Some of these obstacles have only recently surfaced, while others are long-standing difficulties for prosecutors that have been exacerbated by new technology or growing trends. Despite the fact that crime rates are at their lowest in over 25 years, prosecutors face significant challenges, including persistent violent crime in urban areas, difficulties obtaining the technical capabilities needed to identify and prevent cybercrime, and the opioid epidemic that has ravaged communities across the United States. Prosecutors are held accountable for their actions and differing litigation strategies while balancing aspects of budgets and resources, working with increasingly larger volumes of digital and electronic evidence developed as a result of technological advancements, partnering with communities and other entities, and being held accountable for their actions and differing litigation strategies (Green & Yaroshefsky, 2016).
The molding of policy directives by supervisors and line agents can be advantageous, but it can also be detrimental to the success of reform initiatives. Initiatives with too broad or imprecise a scope, for example, are vulnerable to misapplication because justice actors interpret them differently. Challenges to the implementation of top-down criminal justice reforms can dramatically weaken their impact. They highlight the role that line prosecutors play in determining the impact of path dependence and the success of the reform-minded prosecution movement. The line agents responsible for directly implementing reforms, likewise, have ample opportunity to weaken their efficacy. We contribute to prior work on path dependence and barriers to criminal justice reform implementation by further considering how the cultural and procedural dynamics of criminal justice organizations each challenge policy change in the prosecutor's office, a bureaucratic institution with longstanding opacity and organizational inertia (R