Pretrial Detention and Recidivism in a High- Crime Environment: Evidence from Colombia

Daniel Jaramillo and Daniel Mejia
Additional contact information
Daniel Jaramillo: Inter-American Development Bank

No 2026-29, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of pretrial detention on subsequent criminal behavior using linked police and judicial administrative records from Bogotá, Colombia, for the period 2008–2018. To address selection into pretrial detention, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of cases to judges who differ in their propensity to detain individuals pretrial. Pretrial detention reduces the probability of rearrest by 9 percentage points and the probability of new charges by 5.4 percentage points, corresponding to reductions of approximately 32 percent and 35 percent relative to the respective baseline means. The estimated reductions in recidivism are concentrated among property crime defendants and repeat offenders. The estimated effects are also larger among defendants with longer detention spells, suggesting that pretrial detention may increase the salience of punishment or disrupt criminal routines and networks. These findings contrast with much of the existing U.S. evidence, which typically finds no net effect on crime.

Keywords: Pretrial detention; recidivism; crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K14 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34
Date: 2026-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Documentos CEDE - Universidad de los Andes

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstreams/handle/1992/78721/dcede202629.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstreams/handle/1992/78721/dcede202629.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/challenge)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstreams/handle/1992/78721/dcede202629.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstreams/handle/1992/78721/dcede202629.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/challenge)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:022915

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Universidad De Los Andes-Cede ().