Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door*

John Humphries, Aurélie Ouss, Kamelia Stavreva, Megan T Stevenson and Winnie van Dijk

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025, vol. 140, issue 4, 2907-2962

Abstract: Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every person incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration (relative to noncarceral conviction) leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. Our empirical results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and overlooked driver of recidivism.

Date: 2025
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Working Paper: Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door (2025)
Working Paper: Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door (2024)
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