“Heart and Soul of a Prosecutor”: The Impact of Prosecutor Role Orientation on Charging Decisions

• Date: 01 February 2022
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Rachel Bowman,Jon Gould,Belén Lowrey-Kinberg
• DOI: 10.1177/00938548211041645
• Subject Matter: Articles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 2, February 2022, 239 –258.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548211041645

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

© 2021 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

239

“HEART AND SOUL OF A PROSECUTOR”

The Impact of Prosecutor Role Orientation on

Charging Decisions

BELÉN LOWREY-KINBERG

St. Francis College

JON GOULD

RACHEL BOWMAN

Arizona State University

In most research, prosecutors are depicted monolithically as “interchangeable parts” rather than as individuals with varied

perspectives. Yet, the prosecution is becoming increasingly diverse, a shift that is likely accompanied by different approaches

to prosecution. Drawing upon the concepts of role orientation and job crafting, we identify three primary orientations to the

job of a prosecutor, that of the Enforcer, the Reformer, and the Advocate. Whereas Enforcers view their job as merely to apply

the law, Reformers focus on rehabilitation of the defendant, and Advocates are instead concerned with retribution for victims.

These three interpretations of prosecutors’ responsibilities translate into different approaches to charging. Furthermore, when

there is a disconnect between a prosecutor’s personal philosophy and that of their office more generally, prosecutors develop

covert ways of exercising their priorities.

Keywords: charging decision; prosecution; role orientation

Although prosecutors engage in many tasks in their day-to-day responsibilities, filing

charges is one of the most consequential. Scholarly work on charging decisions pri-

marily examines how case and defendant characteristics affect the charges filed or declined.

In broad terms, studies find that prosecutors charge cases that are most likely to result in

convictions (Albonetti, 1986; Spohn et al., 2001). In doing so, they consider legal and extra-

legal factors when selecting charges, such as the strength of the evidence and the victim–

defendant relationship (Albonetti, 1986; Frohmann, 1991; Spohn et al., 2001).

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The authors would like to thank the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center for access

to the data used in this project. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Belén Lowrey-

Kinberg, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College, 182 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY

11201; e-mail: bvlowrey-kinberg@sfc.edu.

1041645CJBXXX10.1177/00938548211041645Criminal Justice and BehaviorLowrey-Kinberg et al. / Impact of Prosecutor Role Orientation on Charging

research-article2021

240 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR

Within the scholarly research on charging decisions, however, little work examines the

traits and beliefs of individual prosecutors and how their professional attitudes impact

charging. Instead, most work in this area describes prosecutors as equivalent to each other

(Levine et al., 2020; Wright & Levine, 2014), seldom recognizing that prosecutors hold dif-

ferent perspectives. Although this uniform perspective on prosecution may have been more

accurate in the past decades, the field of prosecution is becoming increasingly diverse,

particularly in terms of life experiences (McWithey, 2020) and gender (Reflective

Democracy Campaign, 2019). Consequently, today’s prosecutors are likely to have varied

perspectives that influence how they carry out their responsibilities.

In this study, we address these gaps in existing prosecution research using data collected

by the authors for the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center’s Prosecutorial Charging

Practices Project (PCPP). As one facet of this project, we conducted interviews and focus

groups with prosecutors in three mid-sized jurisdictions centered on the factors that prose-

cutors consider in making charging decisions. In this study, we draw upon the concept of

role orientation or how employees define their responsibilities on the job, as we examine

how prosecutors view their work and how this influences their charging decisions. In addi-

tion, this research addresses a gap in the extant scholarship by focusing on mid-sized offices

that are representative of more jurisdictions in the United States than those examined in

other prosecution research.

BACKGROUND

THE ROLE OF THE PROSECUTOR

The role of prosecutors is ambiguously, and often contradictorily, defined. As Sklansky

(2016) points out, prosecutors are asked to be “zealous advocates and impartial reviewers

of the facts, crime fighters and instruments of mercy, law enforcement leaders and officers

of the court, loyal public servants and independent professionals, champions of commu-

nity values and defenders of the rule of law” (p. 477).1 Even a concept as seemingly uni-

versal as “justice” may face varying interpretations depending on the prosecutor (Bellin,

2020). The resulting ambiguity, combined with prosecutors’ extensive discretion (Medwed,

2010; Sklansky, 2016), lends itself to the possibility that individual prosecutors will not

have uniform perspectives on their roles and responsibilities. Below, we discuss these het-

erogeneous perspectives in the context of prosecutors’ demographic characteristics and

professional backgrounds, as well as the concepts of role orientation and role conflict.

Personal Traits

Several personal traits—namely, sex and race—appear to play a role in how prosecutors

approach their responsibilities. For example, female prosecutors, especially those early in

their career, may be concerned that they are viewed as less capable (Wright & Levine, 2014)

than their male colleagues. Some describe changing their personal appearance (e.g., wear-

ing glasses) to counteract this notion.

Race is another personal trait that appears to influence prosecutors’ orientation. Gilbert

(2018) describes the toll of being both female and Black in a field of predominantly White

men and was aware of how stereotypes applied to Black women might impact how they

were perceived by colleagues and jurors. Moreover, as both women and members of a racial