The Deterrent Effects of Prison: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Francesco Drago, R. Galbiati, P. Vertova. Journal of Political Economy, 2009

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006 represents a natural experiment to analyze the behavioral response of individuals to an exogenous manipulation of prison sentences. On the basis of a unique data set on the postrelease behavior of former inmates, we find that 1 month less time served in prison commuted into 1 month more in expected sentence for future crimes reduces the probability of recidivism by 0.16 percentage points. From this result we estimate an elasticity of average recidivism with respect to the expected punishment equal to −0.74 for a 7‐month period.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2f899795dd51b35770b5ca1ce6da21bd453e33c

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Citations in the corpus

Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature (2017, background): “For example, Drago, Galbiati, and Vertova (2009) study the effect of a 2006 collective clemency of incarcerated prisoners in Italy.”
Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists (2013, background): “The difficulties in disentangling them may be seen in a recent study by Drago, Galbiati, and Vertova (2009) of Italy's Collective Clemency Bill.”
Imprisonment and Reoffending (2009, background): “The Drago, Galbiati, and Vertova (2009) and Helland and Tabarrok (2007) findings are supportive of this expectations-based mechanism but in a specific sort of way.”
TESTING ENFORCEMENT STRATEGIES IN THE FIELD: THREAT, MORAL APPEAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION (2013, background): “Despite substantial advances of the empirical literature (for a survey, see Levitt and Miles, 2007), there are only a few studies that solve the identification problem (e.g., Corman and Mocan, 2000; Levitt, 2002; DiTella and Schargrodsky, 2004; Drago et al., 2009).”
A random walk in the literature on criminality: A partial and critical view on some statistical analyses and modelling approaches (2010, background): “hal-00404405, version 1 - 16 Jul 2009 A very recent study based on a natural experiment in Italy [ 24 ] corroborates the general deterrence hypothesis: increasing the expected punishment lowers the propensity to recommit a crime (at least within the seven months following release).”
How should inmates be released from prison? An assessment of parole versus fixed-sentence regimes (2013, background): “Drago et al. (2009) uses a 2006 Italian clemency and finds that an early release from prison combined with a greater expected sentence conditional on recidivism lowers future recidivism, consistent with predictions from general deterrence theory.”