An Empirical Analysis of Imprisoning Drug Offenders
By I. Kuziemko, Steven D. Levitt. 2004
189 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The number of prisoners incarcerated on drug-related offenses rose fifteen-fold between 1980 and 2000. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of the implications of that dramatic shift in public policy. We show that the increase in drug prisoners led to reductions in expected time served for other crimes, especially for less serious offenses. Reductions in time served, however, increased other crimes by no more than a few percent. Moreover, incarcerating drug offenders is found to be almost as effective in reducing violent and property crime as locking up other types of offenders. We estimate that cocaine prices are 10-15 percent higher today as a consequence of increases in drug punishment since 1985. Based on previous estimates of the price elasticity of demand for cocaine, this implies a reduction in cocaine consumed of as much as 20 percent.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/825344f7e43dd8c36f86a2233343139482c29222
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- A random walk in the literature on criminality: A partial and critical view on some statistical analyses and modelling approaches (2010, unknown): “…and the existence of death penalty as a proxy for severity of punishment [36] ; per capita drug arrests as a proxy for certainty of punishment [65] ; death rate among prisoners as a proxy for prison conditions [59] ; demographic characteristics of those who get arrested as a proxy of the…”
- The Effects of DNA Databases on Crime (2017, background): “4See Levitt (1996), Johnson and Raphael (2011), Kuziemko and Levitt (2004), and Owens (2009).”
- Fear of Crime and Housing Prices: Household Reactions to Sex Offender Registries (2008, unknown): “7 This finding is quite different from the cross-sectional result produced by Larsen et al. (2003) and has important policy implications about how the released information is affecting household welfare. A third contribution of this study is that it analyzes if households and housing prices reacted ”