Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door /

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to s...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
1. Verfasser:
Humphries, John Eric
Körperschaft:
National Bureau of Economic Research
Weitere Verfasser:
Ouss, Aurelie, Stavreva, Kamelia, Stevenson, Megan T., van Dijk, Winnie
Format:
Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht:
Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2024.
Zusammenfassung:
Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration (relative to noncarceral conviction) leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. Our empirical results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and overlooked driver of recidivism.
Umfang:
1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
Anmerkungen:
August 2024.
Schlagworte: