Prison Labor: The Price of Prisons and the Lasting Effects of Incarceration

Abstract

Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extrajudicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are primarily used as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized 65 years of archival records on prisons from 1920 to 1995 and provide new estimates on the value of colonial prison labor and the effects of labor demand shocks on incarceration. We find that prison labor was economically valuable to the colonial regime, making up a significant share of colonial public works expenditure. Positive economic shocks increased incarceration rates over the colonial period. This result is reversed in the postcolonial period, where prison labor is not a notable feature of state public finance. We document a significant reduction in present-day trust in legal institutions, such as the police, in areas with high historical exposure to colonial imprisonment; the resulting reduction in trust is specific to legal institutions.

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