DCE Theses and Dissertations

North Carolina’s K-12 public education system suffers from inadequate funding, which diminishes the quality of education provided to students. What explains this? Although there are many potential ways to increase revenue for public K-12 education, the most substantive way is to raise taxes. However, I find that since Republicans believe that low taxes are the key to economic growth, they have made it challenging to raise taxes and difficult to justify any increases that are proposed. As a result, and since Republicans currently control the General Assembly, public K-12 education in North Carolina continues to be inadequately funded.

Understandings of soft power usually focus on its role in a relationship between larger, more militarily and economically powerful countries towards their less powerful counterparts. This thesis explores the inverse by asking: what does soft power look like when deployed by a less powerful state, towards more powerful states? Post-Cold War South Korea presents a useful case study: placed geopolitically between military and economic superpowers, it has consciously transformed itself into a cultural superpower through K-Pop as its government pursued its long-standing security interests of immediate peninsula stability, denuclearization in North Korea, and eventual peninsula reunification. In this thesis, I consider the role of K-Pop in South Korea’s three most significant security relationships: its ally and security guarantor, the United States; a nearby growing superpower, China; and its most pressing security liability, a North Korea in rapid pursuit of becoming a nuclear power. I also consider South Korea’s notable global influence as an internationally trusted leader of multilateral institutions. The results of this review support that post-Cold War South Korea’s government-supported growth into a cultural superpower through K-Pop does indeed play an important role in the dynamic of its security relationships with the United States and China, positively supporting its national security goals, and helping to position the post-Cold War republic into a key leader in multilateral institutions.

There is growing evidence that Russian wheat exports are positioned as a strategic tool of influence to foster State interests geopolitically. This research studies the Russian wheat industry under the leadership of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin through the lens of the state’s three-factor domestic policy emphasizing food self-sufficiency, national security, and export growth. Russia evolved to become the largest single wheat grain exporter globally capable of significant market power. Russia’s wheat currently meets over eighty percent of the importing consumption needs of the Middle East and North Africa at prices typically thirty percent below world market price. This research outlines Russia’s supply chain for wheat export, including an analysis of the state grain trading company United Grain Corporation (UGC). Examples of Russia’s explicit use of wheat grain export in its foreign policy are detailed, including an examination of a series of wheat market interventions directed by the State. The analysis of Russian wheat policies in a geopolitical context is a neglected area of research and should be considered as an inherent component of the multidimensional challenges facing the United States and its relations with petrochemical exporting nations.

The goal of this thesis is to examine the question: why the current 42nd Parliament of Canada fails to achieve gender parity within the House of Commons? Additionally, it assists in comprehending why Canada’s Parliament does not have a substantial number of female Members of Parliament (MPs). The paper also looks at the low number of women candidates in the 2015 election in comparison to the number of male candidates. I also study the contributing factors hindering the progress of parity. My initial hypothesis is that the lack of gender parity in the House of Commons is due to the political process, which includes the role of political parties, the electoral system, the lifestyle of MPs and the role of the media. I also hypothesize that it is due to incumbency and the lack of priority given to achieving gender parity. Thus, with a lack of priority and more male candidates, achieving gender parity is more difficult. This also includes the lack of willingness on the part of certain leaders and parities. While certain scholars have studied components of gender parity, I believe there is a gap in the literature. Furthermore, the vast majority of scholarship tends to focus on one specific component of gender parity and not the various components together. The literature also does not delve deep enough into the issue and for this reason I hope to add to the existing literature. Subsequently, this may further assist in helping close the gap.
Within the thesis, I employ various research methods. One of the research methods is the use of both primary sources and secondary academic studies. This includes both Canadian and non-Canadian sources which are then applied to my arguments. Another method is the conducting of interviews with current and former MPs. I also look at newspaper articles, government databases and websites, bills presented by MPs and public speeches/statements. After conducting my research, I find a number of factors contributing to the lack of gender parity in Parliament. I also examine the various regional patterns of female candidacy within in Canada, prior to presenting my findings. I find that one of the factors contributing to the lack of gender parity is due to the role and responsibility of political parties and leaders. Another factor is the electoral system. Other factors include the role of the media and the profession itself. I also examine a number of potential solutions that can assist in achieving gender parity, although I do not endorse any one particular remedy. These include quotas, electoral reform, the appointment and promotion of women within parties, making Parliament more “women friendly” or “family friendly”, role models and mentoring, financial penalties and incentives, and running women in more “winnable ridings”. In conclusion, after researching and examining these factors, my findings reveal that my initial hypothesize was only partly correct and did not go far enough. Furthermore, my initial hypothesis did not include potential solutions for gender inequality. On a personal level, I find the role of political parties and leaders the most convincing.

This thesis modifies and expands an analytical framework for understanding the democratization process and its relation to conflict in post-Soviet countries after the breakdown of Soviet Union. It utilizes the concept of linkages and leverages by Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way to explore linkages of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Belarus to Russia, as an example of consolidated authoritarian regional power and analyzes the patterns of conflict in the post-Soviet countries. The research for this thesis is conducted by a mixed-method approach that simultaneously applies qualitative and quantitative analysis. Quantitative research involved analyzing national-level variables for four countries while qualitative analysis, through examination of local sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Georgian and Belorussian languages helped to fill the gaps that were not adequately addressed by the quantitative research alone.
Preliminary investigation of conflicts between Russia and its neighbors found that conflicts go hand in hand with democracy changes. As such, after each instance of structural violence, democratization score tends to worsen. Worsening of democratization score ceases only upon presence of an armed conflict. Furthermore, after each armed conflict democratization score tends to improve, unless followed by another instance of structural violence. Next, through multiple regression analysis, the research found that all the linkages were important for democratization. While each country had a different picture of significant for democratization linkages, intergovernmental linkage with Russia proved to have an impact on democratization in all four countries. Leverages proved to have an impact on democratization only in the case of Belarus. While armed conflict and structural violence, along with revolution did not prove to have direct impact on democratization, changes in linkages were indeed affected by conflicts: armed conflict brings decrease in linkages with Russia while instances of structural violence showed an immediate drop in linkages and a gradual rise afterwards.
The thesis concluded that instances of structural violence and armed conflict influence democratization differently as they provide different ways for solving the hostile situations. The cooperation, possibly at the expense of pro-Western democratic policies, is possible only in the case of structural violence. Furthermore, linkages are important for democratization as a bargaining tool in a conflict.

Over the last twenty years, Khartoum has seen an explosion of rural mass exodus to the urban centers which has brought about social change and created a melting pot of identities once separated by tribe, language, and distance. The relationship between urbanization and the political context in Khartoum is an area that remains largely untouched within the broader scholarship on Sudan. This research provides a nuanced analysis of urbanization in Khartoum as a new and largely unexplored trend. It asks whether urbanization has been an accelerating or decelerating force for the regime’s staying power. Ultimately, it finds a hybrid conclusion: that while urbanization strengthened the regime for almost thirty years—primarily due to the size and reach of the government’s security apparatus, extreme poverty, and the deliberate dissolution of political parties—this has been countered by the changing ethnographic makeup of the city. The youth-led popular protest of April 2019 was marked by unprecedented ethnic, class, and gender diversity that differentiated it from the elite-led, middle-class revolutions of the past. This thesis suggests that while urbanization in Khartoum benefited the National Congress Party (NCP) regime at certain intervals, it also had unforeseen consequences that ultimately accelerated regime change in Sudan.

Local government spending on social welfare activities, such as public health and hospitals, public welfare, education subsidies, and affordable housing, often is characterized in the scholarly literature as “paradoxical,” as it departs from the predictions of the seminal perspective on the financial activities of local governments, the economically based theory of public choice. The theory claims that the prospect of resident mobility should act as a constraint on the “redistribution” of revenue from affluent taxpayers to the needy, who consume more in public services than they pay in taxes. According to public choice, affluent residents should leave cities and towns when they do not benefit from the taxes they pay, specifically, when local governments use tax funds to provide services to other, less-advantaged residents. However, the empirics of local social welfare activity depart from the model’s predictions in two important ways: firstly, local governments do offer social welfare services, spending $193.1 billion in 2007, the focal year of this analysis, on public health, welfare, and housing and community development alone, which may indicate public support for such efforts rather than the unitary opposition posited in the public choice view. Secondly, though public choice depicts municipalities as the sole providers of local services, local governance is more fragmented in actuality: municipal governments, county governments, special-purpose districts, and school districts all may provide services in a given city or town, including social welfare programs. Due to these two phenomena, explanations of the local social welfare role remain incomplete. To explore the possibility that public preferences might explain the existence of local social welfare spending and to allow for variations in the scope of local service provision, two unique contributions to the literature, I employ both newly available measures of city-level ideology tabulated by political scientists Chris Tausanovich and Christopher Warshaw and data on the combined expenditures of all local governments that serve the residents of 112 U.S. cities compiled by researchers at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In preliminary (“baseline”) linear regression models, I find that local governments that serve more liberal residents spend more on social welfare than do more conservative communities. However, the results of expanded regression models, which control for a greater number of demographic covariates, are less definitive, potentially indicating that local expenditures may be affected not only by local resident ideology but by state and federal influences when higher levels of government provide cities and towns with social welfare aid. The local social welfare role clearly is more complex than the parsimonious public choice theory can explain, necessitating future research on a larger sample of communities and theoretical perspectives that extend beyond economic models to examine how resident preferences, variations in the scope of local governance, and the division of responsibility between federal, state, and local governments interact to shape local policy.

In this thesis, I perform a comparative case study on the status of freedom of education and related parental rights in the era of the rights of the child. The aim of this case study is to provide insight into whether freedom of education and the right of the child to an education can effectively coexist. This thesis begins by clarifying the history of these rights and their implications in international laws and treaties. The thesis then turns to answering the question: Can governments effectively mediate between freedom of education and the right of the child to an education when these rights come into conflict, or does the right of the child to a certain level of elementary education necessarily delegitimize or, to a lesser extent, limit the freedom of parents to choose how their children are educated? In order to answer this question, this thesis performs a comparative case study of the legal and political status of these rights in three nations: Germany, the United States, and Brazil. This case study evaluates and compares education policies in the three test nations. The data utilized in this thesis includes legal, historical, judicial, and policy documents from the test nations. In addition, this thesis utilizes scholarly research and philosophical writings on the topics of freedom of education, parental rights, and freedom of education. Freedom of education and the right of the child to an education are both important rights that are affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and both rights ought to be protected in national and international laws. This case study finds that freedom of education, parental rights, and the child’s right to receive an education can effectively coexist. As is the case with many other rights (for example, privacy and security), these rights may sometimes come into conflict. Nevertheless, these conflicts do not invalidate the importance of either right or the duty of individual nations to protect both rights. Law and treaties that protect freedom of education do not preclude the possibility that governments should step in if parents wantonly neglect their duty to educate their child. Governments can and should put monitoring policies in place to ensure that the child’s right to an education is protected. Likewise, laws protecting the right of the child to an education do not necessitate a government monopoly over education at the expense of parental rights and freedom of education.

This study explored the relationship between the communications strategies used by public school districts and the success of levy votes used to determine levels of school district funding. In particular, it investigated whether public school districts in Ohio that engage in pro-active, two-way communications prior to going on the ballot and campaigning for a tax increase levy are more likely to succeed than districts that do not engage in such activities. This question also leads to a significant follow up: What is the role of district leadership (i.e., school district superintendent) in creating and fostering a culture that values ongoing, pro-active two-way communication with the community? Data were drawn from academic literature, personal interviews with district leadership, and primary materials (i.e., school newsletters and records of social media content) in three, detail-rich case studies of specific levy campaigns in Ohio. By identifying emerging themes across these case studies, this study argued that a school district can employ seven effective factors to achieve success at the levy ballot: 1) hiring communication-consulting help for the school district; 2) employing survey research (or polling) on the entire population of the school district’s community to assess views and priorities related to support for school funding; 3) mailing traditional community newsletters to the community at large; 4) employing social media; 5) employing two-way communications strategies ranging from tweet-ups to coffee klatches; 6) engaging in personal interaction in which district leadership meets with community members in a town hall style format, cultural events, coffee klatches, or one on one meetings; and finally 7) district leadership’s influencing the school district culture and perception of the school district to fit the needs and desires of the community so as to instill the community’s confidence that additional revenue constitutes a worthy investment. This research suggested that engaging in proactive two-way communications constitutes a highly successful strategy in levy passage and therefore does make expenditures associated with it worthwhile. However, the amount of such resources actually spent would depend on the particular district’s situation and so must be decided on a case-by-case basis by the district itself. Findings offer insights for broader questions of the importance of two-way communications in building support for public institutions.

The British and U.S. ambassadors to Japan in 1941 both believed that war could have been averted, or at least delayed, if their respective home offices had made differ- ent diplomatic choices more in accord with their advice. Sir Robert Craigie and Joseph Grew saw missed opportunities for compromise, while the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Department of State gave more credence to the theory that Japan’s military extremists would prevail over the voices of moderation, and that Japan was ultimately un- willing to retreat from China; therefore, war was inevitable. Was the attention shown to the ambassadors’ warnings adequate and justified? Previous academic research has analyzed the reporting of Ambassadors Craigie and Grew leading up to the outbreak of war in the Pacific. This reporting was based primarily on their interactions with government officials and other members of the Japanese elite. Any conclusions as to the accuracy of the ambassadors’ predictions, quality of advice, and overall success of the embassies they led, can be enhanced by a comparison of their observations, a better understanding of their personal and professional relation- ship, and their reliance upon collaboration. Professional and personal correspondence reveals that Grew and Craigie main- tained an effective, collegial, professional association, notwithstanding an awkward so- cial relationship. Together, they labored under restrictions on the amount of sensitive information disseminated by the Foreign Office and the State Department. Their coun- tries did not always share the same agenda or national interest. Grew and Craigie bore the stigma of “appeasers,” due to their belief that U.S. and British diplomacy could have done more to support the cause of the Japanese moderates. Yet, they both were “on the record” as accurately warning about the risk of underestimating Japan’s response to economic strangulation from sanctions and the likelihood of heightened Japanese aggression should the 1941 peace talks falter. However, the two ambassadors, particularly Grew, also missed an opportunity to further delay or avert war by not being even more ardent in their 1941 entreaties. Consequently, they overestimated the extent to which their recommendations were likely to be adopted by the decision makers in London and Washington.

This thesis wants to focus on how Rwandan officials, working with international colleagues, seek to reform the academic curricula in primary and high school to create a "new Rwanda." Such reforms seek to shape a new nation; nevertheless these reforms seem to be limited by Rwanda's current political dynamics and position in the international community. This thesis is constructive, since it aims to act as a further critique and assessment of the Rwandan education system and its weak reforms. The analysis of Rwanda’s new academic reforms will therefore include influential works, by scholars who before me tackled this reform. This analysis of Rwanda’s education reform will seek to understand the ways in which this new academic model will allow for the development of a new national identity among the younger population. This new identity should be strong enough that won’t be threatened by ethnical divisions like the ones that have affected the earlier generations. The main rationale behind the examination of the Rwandan education reform is to provide the pathways in which this reform should direct to and asses the progress its doing and its actual effectiveness.

Peace education is educational instruction focusing on a pupil’s sense of community, civic duty and cooperation. Peace education scholars hypothesize that it offers a way to foster peace and reconciliation in countries and regions coping with the aftermath of conflict. Peace education is a dynamic field of research that has gained increased attention in academia over the last four decades. One of the main propositions that scholars have investigated in this field is the possible relationship between education and the success of post-conflict development and reconciliation measures. The conflict in Sri Lanka was a decades-long armed conflict that was often described both as an ethnic conflict and as a civil war. While the warring parties were indeed of different ethnic groups, a closer examination of the conflict reveals that the tension between the ethnic groups stemmed from competition over economic and political resources and power as a legacy of ‘divide and rule’ policies set in place by a colonial ruler. After Sri Lanka gained independence from the British Empire, there was a struggle to revise the political structure that led to violent conflict. This conflict officially ended in 2009 at which time there was a renewed focus on reconstruction and reconciliation efforts that could include peace education. In this thesis, I analyze peace education studies with specific consideration given to three primary aspects of the implementation of a peace education program in post-conflict Sri Lanka, which include examining the appropriate agent and timing of implementation as well as the viability of such a program given the ongoing tension relating to ethnic and linguistic differences.

Beginning in 1970, Oman experienced modernization at a rapid pace due to the discovery of oil. At that time, the country still had not invested much in infrastructure development, and a large part of the national population had low levels of literacy as they lacked formal education. For these reasons, the national workforce was unable to fuel the growing oil and gas sector, and the Omani government found it necessary to import foreign labor during the 1970s. Over the ensuing decades, however, the reliance on foreign labor has remained and has led to sharp labor market imbalances. Today the foreign-born population is 45 percent of Oman’s total population and makes up an overwhelming 89 percent of the private sector workforce. This reliance on foreign labor combined with high levels of population growth in recent years has led to an unemployment crisis for Omani youth, where 48 percent of young adults in the 15 to 24-year-old age range are reportedly unemployed. The Omani youth are at a disadvantage as companies in the private sector must pay them a higher minimum wage than their foreign worker counterparts. Prospective employers also tend to believe that young Omanis lack adequate training and work experience when compared to foreign workers. Many young Omani job seekers show significant ambivalence toward the job market because they are caught between different development frameworks, where the rentier-type state relationships that benefited their parents’ generation are no longer feasible given the growth of the Omani population and the number of young job seekers who are now active in the economy. Feeding into this ambivalence are the discourses or frameworks of thinking that are reproduced in how job seekers and employers talk and think about finding employment in Oman today. An abundance of foreign labor, the lack of adequate training, and a preference for government sector employment are now a sort of consensus in the literature that is used to explain why there are labor market imbalances in the Gulf Region more generally. In this research, I use in-depth interview and survey data with Omani job seekers, government officials, and company representatives to demonstrate that such perceptions are not as generalizable as assumed nor are they as clear-cut in every case. For example, the survey data in this research indicates that some parents of university graduates work in the private sector or have their own businesses in addition to regular salaried work in the government sector. Therefore, there may be more diversity and flexibility in earning a livelihood than is recognized. Although the scope for the empirical research in this study is small and exploratory, this thesis will describe the dynamics that help create gaps between the different labor market actors in Oman; gaps in the dynamics between the private sector and the educational system that some of the participants described as a “mismatch.” I suggest paths for further research to demonstrate why Omani youth are ambivalent toward the job prospects available and why they are not quite sure how to imagine their working futures in the private sector or as entrepreneurs.

The United States is one of the few democracies in the world that never had a female leader. The 2016 presidential election marked the first time that a woman was nominated by a major political party. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more votes than any other candidate that came before her, but despite this accomplishment she did not receive enough electoral votes and lost the presidency. Since then, many scholars have been trying to examine whether gender played any part in influencing the outcome of the election. With women being so underrepresented in American political offices, we must ask ourselves why that is. Is it because of mainstream media coverage being so gendered and biased against female politicians? Is it because of a culture of sexual harassment and sexism in the American workplace? Are voters simply not willing to have women in positions of power? Clearly, there were other unique circumstances and factors that played a role in the 2016 election, such as Russian meddling and inappropriate communication from the then-Director of the FBI. Yet it is telling that it has taken the United States so long to even reach the milestone of having a viable female candidate for the presidency, and it is even more telling that she lost to someone who has no government experience as well as many disqualifying scandals. This paper will explore sexism in American politics and will attempt to examine just how mainstream media and gender equality laws exacerbate it. It will focus on three case-study countries, all currently led by a female head of state: The United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand. This paper will strive to answer a very important question: what makes the United States so different from other countries that have managed to shatter their own glass ceilings?

How does political bias affect behavior in day-to-day interactions with other people? Does a person’s behavior change based on the political identity of those they interact with? An important step in answering these questions is to study what types of determinants impact behavior, how behavior is affected, and to measure the extent of any observed changes that might occur. This research set up a simulation between proposers and hypothetical responders to track changes in the proposer’s behavior during the strategic interaction. The results showed that when the political identity of the hypothetical responder was Republican, the behavior of two groups, No Party Affiliated proposers and Democrat proposers, was affected. There were no significant findings of positive bias in the distribution of money allocated within party groups.

The Texas Top Ten Percent Plan (the “plan”) guarantees students from Texas high schools admittance into any state university, so long as the student graduates in the top ten percent of his or her class. The effects of the plan with respect to the impact it has had on the demographic characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status at Texas’s flagship university — The University of Texas at Austin (“UT”) — have been widely studied and debated. The exhaustive study of the plan may even lead some to conclude that nothing more can be said about it. I beg to differ. The plan was enacted by the Texas legislature with the fundamental purpose of attaining geographic diversity at UT. Yet, studies concerning the plan have tended to focus solely on evaluating how well the legislation attains racial and socioeconomic diversity. Few studies have evaluated whether the plan has attained geographic diversity. Those that have, use a flawed metric — an increase in the number of feeder schools — to reach their conclusions. I fill that gap here and evaluate whether the plan has increased the geographic diversity of entering students at the Lone Star State’s most coveted campus. Evaluating admissions data from both before and after plan, I hone in on the geographical location of each entering freshman class at UT and find that geographic diversity has remained nearly the same at UT. Before the plan, in 1997, the entering class at UT largely came from five of Texas’s twenty educational regions, each of which surrounds one of Texas’s metropolitan areas. After the plan, the story has remained largely the same: the proportionate number of students coming from one of those five regions has remained at around 80%.

The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 100 million domestic workers around the world. The majority of these domestic workers are women. Although they have an important presence around the world, domestic workers remained as a group of laborers with one of the worst exploitative working conditions. In fact, domestic work is associated more with slavery than to a formal profession that produces value which gives rise to a monetary compensation. Despite is lack of recognition, domestic workers are servers and not servants. In the words of Eliseo Orifece , in the movie La Vita è Bella, "You're serving. You're not a servant. Serving is a supreme art. God is the first servant. God serves men but he's not a servant to men ."
The purpose of this research is to study the possible reasons behind the regnant nature of domestic service as one of the main sources of employment for women locally and as migrants. This problematic will be frame in the context of Colombia. At the same time, a global perspective will be constantly developed in order to evolve into a global solution. The solution is the notion that domestic work needs to be professionalized since it is able to absorb an important number of women into the labor market. The evidence that will be provided, strongly suggests that domestic work is a needed profession that will likely increase as more women enter the labor market. The rationality is that in a world where governmental care services are shrinking, and men have a narrow participation in housework, middle and upper-class women to enter the labor force have to rely on other women to transfer their care and housework responsibilities.

The factors that influence American public approval for military humanitarian interventions are wide-ranging, with studies showing the importance of domestic and international effects. A gap in the current body of literature is the potential influence of the president’s partisan identification on public approval. This thesis investigates this connection using the cases of U.S. military humanitarian interventions in Somalia and Bosnia. The hypothesis of this work is that partisan identification with the president was an important factor in approval for the military humanitarian interventions in Somalia under George H.W. Bush and Bosnia under Bill Clinton. Informal comparisons between multiple polls from each intervention and measures of bivariate association found evidence of a positive relationship between partisan identification with the president and approval for the intervention. Multivariate logistic regressions provided mixed results. Other potentially important explanatory factors controlled for in the analysis include attitudes to domestic and foreign policies, age, sex, and education. Partisan identification with the president was not a statistically significant factor in approval in Somalia under Bush but was in Bosnia under Clinton. The divergent results lead to the conclusion that partisan identification with the president can be influential the formation of public opinion, but a different combination of demographic and attitudinal factors drove approval for each intervention.

Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in the U.S. criminal justice system. While racial disparity in case outcomes is often attributed to law enforcement practices or judicial decision making, the role of prosecutors is often overlooked. In fact, prosecutors have wide discretionary power in case processing decisions—from initial screening, charging, bail, and pretrial recommendations, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations. (Devers 2011) It is projected that 94 to 97 percent of cases end in a negotiated plea bargain (Balko 2018). These negotiations vary from individual, office, and jurisdiction; so that cases involving similar charges and even similar defendants may have decidedly different results depending on the judgment of the assigned prosecutor . To what extent does the Manhattan District Attorney’s offices evaluative criteria that determines plea agreements provide equitable opportunities for defendants? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics , in 2003 there were 75, 573 cases disposed of in federal district court by trial or plea. Of these, about 95 percent were disposed of by a guilty plea . It is also estimated that about 90 to 95 percent of both federal and state court cases are resolved through the plea-bargaining process initiated by Prosecutors (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire, 1990). The plea agreement process has been criticized for allowing prosecutors too much discretion compared to judges, who are held to concise sentencing guidelines (Baliko 2018). Prosecutorial bias can be extremely detrimental to the plea agreement process as some prosecutors have been found to use threats that coerce defendants into accepting pleas to secure a conviction when the evidence in a case is insubstantial. (Devers 2011) Manhattan, New York City has jurisdiction over about two million people. Cyrus Vance, Jr., heads the prosecutor’s office as the District Attorney of New York. His office is one of the largest and busiest prosecutor’s offices in the country with more than 500 assistant district attorneys and 700 support staff members, handling more than 100,000 cases annually.