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