Most people are familiar with a justice system made up of the police and the courts. Police are visible. Judges are public. Far fewer people could tell you who their local prosecutor is or what they actually do. But according to new research by °®ĹľÍřfaculty member Jamie Carson and doctoral researcher Joshua Baldwin, that gap in understanding, and perhaps trust, matters more than most of us realize.
“Prosecutors sit in a really unique position,” Carson explains. “They’re incredibly powerful, but much less visible. They make critical decisions behind the scenes.”
Those decisions—whether to bring charges, negotiate plea deals, or recommend sentences—shape outcomes in the vast majority of criminal cases. And yet, public attention rarely focuses on them. That disconnect is exactly what motivated a study on public trust in prosecutors.
A Hidden Power in the Justice System
For Carson, the project grew out of a larger body of research on prosecutorial elections and how they’ve changed.
“What we realized,” he says, “is that we have a lot of research about what prosecutors do. But we don’t know nearly as much about how people feel about them.”
That question—how trust is built or lost—became the foundation of this paper. Their findings point to a striking reality: prosecutors operate with high discretion, low visibility, and relatively weak electoral accountability. That combination makes public trust especially important.
“If citizens don’t trust their prosecutors,” Carson says, “then the legitimacy of a large part of the criminal justice system is really placed under strain.”
What Actually Shapes Trust?
The research identifies several key factors influencing whether people trust prosecutors.
Some are personal—like race, gender, and political beliefs. Others are broader, such as how connected people feel to their communities or whether they believe they have a voice in government.
But one of the most important findings is that people don’t evaluate prosecutors in isolation.
“Oftentimes,” Baldwin explains, “people aren’t making strong distinctions between prosecutors, courts, and police when they think about trust.”
Instead, trust tends to move together across institutions. If someone has confidence in government or the justice system more broadly, they’re more likely to trust prosecutors. If that confidence breaks down, it affects prosecutors as well.
That has major implications.
“It means prosecutors’ reputations aren’t entirely their own,” Baldwin says. “They’re shaped by the larger system people experience.”
A Surprising Finding About Elections
One of the study’s most unexpected conclusions challenges a long-held assumption about accountability. Even though most local prosecutors are elected, the researchers found that how prosecutors are selected—whether through partisan elections, nonpartisan elections, or appointment—does not significantly change public trust.
“At first glance, that’s surprising,” Carson says. “We tend to think elections are what hold officials accountable.”
But in practice, these races are often low-profile and low-information. Many voters don’t know how their local prosecutor got into office, or even who they are. At the same time, deeper forces—like personal experience with the justice system—play a bigger role.
“It’s really about lived experience and group position,” Carson explains. “Those things shape how people view prosecutors more than institutional structures do.”
Why It Matters Now
The findings come at a moment when trust in public institutions is under intense scrutiny nationwide. And yet, prosecutors are often left out of that conversation.
“That’s interesting,” Carson says, “because prosecutors make decisions that are probably more likely to affect us personally than what happens in Congress or even the presidency.”
From deciding what charges to bring to determining whether a case goes to trial at all, prosecutors play a pivotal role in how justice is carried out.
“They’re kind of the hinge point,” Baldwin adds. “They influence both what police do and what judges decide.”
So What Builds Trust?
If changing how prosecutors are elected doesn’t move the needle, what does? The answer is less about structure and more about connection and understanding.
“Knowledge is huge,” Baldwin says. “The more people understand what prosecutors do and how they make decisions, the more likely they are to form informed opinions about them.”
Carson agrees, pointing to a combination of factors including transparency, public awareness, and broader confidence in government. Trust, in other words, isn’t built in one place. It’s shaped across the entire system and through people’s everyday experiences within it.
A Starting Point for Bigger Questions
Carson and Baldwin see this research as just the beginning.
“There’s been a lot of work on trust in Congress, the presidency, the courts,” Carson says. “Prosecutors have largely been left out of that conversation.”
Their goal is to change that by bringing attention to an often-overlooked group of public officials whose decisions carry enormous weight.
“At a basic level,” Baldwin adds, “understanding how people feel about these actors is a step toward building better institutions.”
