Life-Course Effects of Imprisonment
Prisons, in their current form, have been in use for nearly two centuries,
but social scientists are still trying to understand what effects these
institutions have on prisoners. Part of the challenge of this task
is the highly selective nature of the imprisonment process, which produces
prison populations that are unlike virtually any other conceivable comparison
group. To overcome this problem, we use random assignment of criminal cases
to judges with stable and large differences in their use of imprisonment to
estimate the effects of imprisonment on employment and criminal recidivism.
Our results suggest that the imprisoned and non-imprisoned individuals in
this study experience indistinguishably high rates of unemployment and recidivism.
Published Papers