Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door
134 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2023 Last revised: 27 Aug 2024
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Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door
Number of pages: 134
Posted: 20 Jul 2023
Last Revised: 27 Aug 2024
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Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door
NBER Working Paper No. w32894
Number of pages: 55
Posted: 03 Sep 2024
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Date Written: July 12, 2023
Abstract
Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who are recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We develop an empirical framework for studying the consequences of noncarceral conviction by extending the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments. 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 they are not met. Under the identifying assumptions, 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. While the identifying assumptions include a strong restriction on judge decision-making, we argue that any bias resulting from its failure is unlikely to change our qualitative conclusions. Lastly, we introduce an alternative empirical strategy, and find that it yields similar estimates. Collectively, these results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism.
Keywords: Conviction, incarceration, recidivism, judge IV, multiple treatments
JEL Classification: K14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Humphries, John Eric and Ouss, Aurelie and Stavreva, Kamelia and Stevenson, Megan and van Dijk, Winnie, Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door (July 12, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4507597 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4507597
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