Criminal Rehabilitation, Incapacitation, and Aging

Peter Ganong

American Law and Economics Review, 2012, vol. 14, issue 2, 391-424

Abstract: In April 1993, Georgia instituted new parole guidelines that led to longer prison terms for parole-eligible offenders. This paper shows that an extra year of prison reduces the three-year recidivism rate by 6 percentage points (14%) and that the benefits of preventing this crime are likely outweighed by the costs of this additional incarceration. I develop a new econometric framework to jointly estimate the effects of rehabilitation, incapacitation, and aging in reducing crime. Estimates of incapacitation effects using existing methodologies are biased upward by at least a factor of 2 because they focus on a short time horizon. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
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