Reforming justice under a security crisis: The case of the criminal justice reform in Mexico.

• We assess how the adoption of a common-law style model affects crime rates, pretrial detention, and judicial efficiency. • There was an increase of 7.05 homicides for every 100000 inhabitants in treated municipalities associated with the reform. • The effect was nonetheless much greater in municipalities that had an established organized crime presence before the reform. • There is a reduction of 16% in the use of pretrial detention for property crimes, but not for homicides. • Our results suggest that most of the negative effects are related to organized crime. This paper assesses how the adoption of a common-law style model affects crime rates, pretrial detention, and judicial efficiency measures. We do this in the context of Mexico, where a judicial reform was fully implemented by 2016, both on the state and federal levels. Using a generalized synthetic control group approach (Xu, 2017) and municipality-level administrative data for the years 1997–2012, we find that the reform increased the homicide rate and was accompanied by a reduction in the use of pretrial detention for property crimes in the early implementer municipalities. The increase in the homicide rate was, nonetheless, much greater in the municipalities with established organized crime presence, where we also observed a greater reduction in the capacity to effectively prosecute homicides. Our results describe the difficulties in implementing this kind of reform in developing countries experiencing security crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]