Delay and Probability Discounting of Legal Outcomes

Legal consequences, including incarceration and contact with the criminal justice system, dramatically impact the lives of many individuals and their families. Though approximately 95% of convictions in state courts are resolved by defendants’ guilty pleas, and the majority of guilty pleas are reached via plea bargaining, there have been relatively few empirical studies assessing the impact of impulsive and risky decision-making strategies in plea-bargaining arrangements. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the degree to which the magnitude of potential legal consequences and the type of legal consequence (prison time vs. sex-offender registration and notification requirements) affect discounting of hypothetical legal consequences as a function of changes in (a) the probability of receiving the consequence or (b) the delay to receiving the consequence in a sample of 486 undergraduates. Overall, participants were more impulsive when plea bargains involved sex-offender registration and notification consequences compared to only prison time. For both prison time and sex-offender registration, participants were less impulsive when they were facing larger potential sentences (e.g., 1-year sentence vs. 25-year sentence). Additionally, participants discounted legal outcomes at different rates based on the probability of conviction, with no differences in discounting observed across consequence type (i.e., prison time and sex-offender registration) or magnitude (e.g., 1-year sentence vs. 25-year sentence).