Prison Population and Crime

Abstract

This is a critical review of the literature concerning the impact of prison populations on crime. It summarizes 44 time series studies that use prison population in the crime equation, emphasizing problems of simultaneity and disaggregation bias. It briefly reviews studies that estimate the incapacitation impact of prisons by using criminals' individual crime rates, emphasizing problems caused by skewness of the crime rates and their relationship with arrest rates. The prior research has numerous problems, such that estimating the impact of prisons is difficult. Almost all the problems bias results towards finding that prisons have limited impacts, and once the problems are addressed the best, but rough, estimate of the elasticity of prison populations on crime is about 1.0.

Keywords: crime, prison, endogeneity, deterrence, incapacitation

JEL Classification: C23, C33, K40