Decarceration and crime: California's experience

Patricio Dominguez, Magnus Lofstrom and Steven Raphael

Chapter 5 in A Modern Guide to the Economics of Crime, 2022, pp 88-134 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: We present a comprehensive evaluation of the effect on crime rates of California's decade of correctional reforms. Beginning in 2011, the state enacted several policy changes through both legislation as well as voter initiatives that greatly reduced prison and jail populations. We find little evidence of an impact on violent crime rates in the state. Once changes in offense definitions and reporting practices in key agencies are accounted for, violent crime in California is generally lower than the levels that existed in 2010 prior to a wave major reform to the state's criminal justice system. While our analysis of violent crime rates yields a few significant point estimates (a decrease in murder for one method and an increase in robbery for another), these findings are highly sensitivity to the method used to generate a counterfactual comparison path. We find more consistent evidence of an impact on property crime. For the earliest major reform, we detect an increase in auto theft. For a major ballot initiative passed in late 2014 (proposition 47) we detect on impact on larceny theft. The latter estimates are sensitive to the method used to generate the counterfactual, with more than half of the relative increase in property crime (and for some estimates considerably more) driven by a decline in the counterfactual crime rate rather than increases for California for several of the estimators that we employ. Despite these measured increases and similar to violent crime, California property crime rates remain at historically low levels.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789909333/9781789909333.00009.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:19378_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().