A recent analysis finds that counties electing tougher prosecutors saw meaningful drops in young men’s mortality, with the biggest gains among young Black men, suggesting consistent prosecution — not leniency — cut gun deaths and other external-cause fatalities.
For the better part of a decade, progressive prosecutors argued that lighter-touch charging and sentencing would heal communities. Their approach shrank prosecutions and prison time while portraying the criminal-legal system as wholesale harm. That policy experiment was rolled out in major cities and left communities to live with the consequences.
A new study by Panka Bencsik and Tyler Giles measured those consequences using close prosecutor races as a natural experiment. By focusing on contests decided by narrow margins, the researchers treated outcomes like a coin flip between competing philosophies and stripped away much geographic and demographic noise. The sample covers 368 districts and 520 counties — about 23% of the U.S. population — and the analysis runs through 2019, before COVID and the later crime shifts.
The headline numbers are stark. All-cause mortality among men ages 20 to 29 fell 6.6% under tougher prosecutors, roughly 9.8 fewer deaths per 100,000. Gun deaths drove that decline, falling by about 6.7 per 100,000, which the study breaks into roughly 4.2 fewer homicides and 2.5 fewer suicides and accidental shootings. Those are not marginal signals; they are measurable, population-level changes.
Results for young Black men were particularly dramatic: deaths from external causes fell around 18%, and gun homicides dropped by 22.5 per 100,000. Progressives often pointed to Black mortality to justify their reforms; in these counties the opposite happened. The data shows communities that were supposed to be protected experienced worse outcomes under permissive prosecution policies.
The researchers tested obvious alternative explanations, starting with incarceration. Greater time behind bars could explain fewer deaths if dangerous people were kept off the street, but increased prison time accounts for only about one-third of the effect among Black men and explains none of it among White men. The larger change came from convictions: misdemeanor convictions rose by about 1,615 per 100,000 and felony convictions rose by about 650 per 100,000, even though jail admissions did not increase — suggesting prosecutors, not police, changed behavior.
Federal law matters here. Many felony convictions and some violent misdemeanor convictions strip individuals and households of legal gun rights, and compliance extends to the whole household. The study estimates that one gun death is prevented for roughly every 90 additional legal bars on gun ownership imposed. In a city of 500,000, that math translates into dozens of lives saved annually without new legislation or extra spending.
The political fallout was already visible on the ground. Prosecutors who adopted permissive policies faced electoral backlash, with high-profile recall efforts and voters removing officials in several cities. Those recall movements were driven by residents living in the neighborhoods affected, not outside political operatives. That gap between architects of reform and people facing its consequences is the moral center of the debate.
The progressive case rested on a moral claim: that relying on criminal punishment harms communities regardless of outcomes. That claim made a clear, testable prediction — permissive prosecution should correlate with worse outcomes for Black communities — and the data falsified it. Instead, counties with tougher, more consistent prosecution saw lower death rates among the men the reforms purported to help.
The authors acknowledge real costs tied to more convictions, including job losses, family strain, and harms to children, and those costs deserve careful study. But the study also forces an uncomfortable question Democrats rarely answer: who counts the cost of 22.5 extra gun homicides per 100,000 young Black men? Public safety outcomes matter to people who live where policies are enforced.
Conservatives have long argued that existing laws, consistently applied, can reduce gun deaths without new federal legislation. This study provides causal evidence in support of that position. “The results are in.” Policymakers and local voters now have concrete outcome data to weigh when prosecutor philosophy is on the ballot.
