Criminal Rehabilitation, Incapacitation, and Aging

Abstract

In April 1993, Georgia instituted new parole guidelines that led to longer prison terms for parole-eligible offenders. This paper shows that an extra year of prison reduces the three-year recidivism rate by 6 percentage points (14 percent); and the benefits of preventing this crime are likely outweighed by the costs of this additional incarceration.

I develop a new econometric framework to jointly estimate the effects of rehabilitation, incapacitation, and aging in reducing crime. Estimates of incapacitation effects using existing methodologies are biased upward by at least a factor of two because they focus on a short time horizon.

JEL Classification: J0, K14