Sleaze in LA Federal Prosecutors Office

Since bureaucracies do not operate with free market incentives, there is no objective way to measure their success or failure. Instead of being measured by profits, bureaucracies measure success by their size and reach. Unlike a profit maximizing business, a bureaucracy wants bloat. Efficiency is a dirty word to a bureaucracy. If they get too efficient they might cease to matter, or, even worse, they might not get to suck up as many tax dollars as before.

So a bureaucracy – any bureaucracy - will rely on proxies for efficiency and end up with workers gaming the measured metrics.

In this case, the prosecutors office concentrated on easy cases to hit their numbers. It remains unclear how many weak cases were pushed through for the sake of quotas:

U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien is facing sharp criticism from prosecutors within his office who say he is pressuring them to file relatively insignificant criminal cases to drive up statistics that make the office eligible for increased federal funding.

The prosecutors said O'Brien's effort to increase filings amounts to a quota system in which lawyers face possible discipline and other career consequences if they fail to achieve their numbers.
...

The disgruntled prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are now spending an exorbitant amount of time working on less significant cases -- mail theft, smaller drug offenses and illegal immigration -- to reach quotas. They cited the recent disbanding of the office's public integrity and environmental crimes section, a unit with a history of working on complex police corruption and political corruption cases, as evidence of a shift toward high-volume, low-quality prosecutions.

"It's all about the numbers," one prosecutor said.

One former supervisor put it this way: "I can't remember how they sugarcoated it, but the feeling around the office was, if you got your quota, then you could work on your real cases without being hassled."

When Judges Become Politicians

Like anybody a position of power, judges are prone to bias and
corruption. In a new article in Forbes, Alexander Tabarrok quantifies how
much worse the damages are if the judge is an elected official.

In research published in the Journal of Law and Economics, Eric Helland, associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College, and I analyzed thousands of tort awards throughout the U.S. We found that awards against out-of-state defendants were 42% higher in states that use partisan elections to select their judges than in states that appoint judges; a $363,000 per-case increase on average.
…
Such awards help judges get re-elected. In a remarkably frank admission, Richard Neely, a West Virginia Supreme Court judge (now retired), explained the incentives that govern elected judges: "As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else's money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me."

No surprise here – people respond to incentives. Giving a jury greater
discretion to determine rewards will, at a minimum, give more power to
a group of people who are not directly incentivized to lean one way or
another. This serves as another reminder that bureaucrats in costume
shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt anymore than the next guy.