Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment

By Manudeep Bhuller, Gordon B. Dahl, K. Løken, Magne Mogstad. Journal of Political Economy, 2016

291 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a random judge design and panel data from Norway, we estimate that imprisonment discourages further criminal behavior, with reoffense probabilities falling by 29 percentage points and criminal charges dropping by 11 over a 5-year period. Ordinary least squares mistakenly reaches the opposite conclusion. The decline is driven by individuals not working prior to incarceration; these individuals increase participation in employment programs and raise their future employment and earnings. Previously employed individuals experience lasting negative employment effects. These findings demonstrate that time spent in prison with a focus on rehabilitation can be preventive for a large segment of the criminal population.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df6452d43f98231a4ff76bfb8933c5d7fcf6c523

Citations in the corpus

• The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes (2019, unknown): “4 follows prior work and shows that the tendency measure defined in Equation (3) is positive in various subsamples (Bhuller et al., 2016; Dobbie et al., 2018b).”