A Theory of ‘Too Big To Jail’

Iwan Bos

Review of Law & Economics, 2021, vol. 17, issue 3, 569-582

Abstract: Motivated by some recent examples, this paper employs a model of public law enforcement to explain why it may not be in society’s interest to send criminals to prison. We establish two main findings. First, independent of the lawbreaker’s societal position, imprisonment is suboptimal when the harm from the illegal activity is sufficiently small. Second, for a given level of harm, imprisonment is suboptimal when the lawbreaker is sufficiently important. This latter result thus provides a rationale for why some parties are taken to be ‘too big to jail’.

Keywords: class justice; nonmonetary sanctions; optimal law enforcement; too big to jail (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1515/rle-2021-0061

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