Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions: Evidence from the Rise of the Evangelical Church in Chile

Andres Barrios Fernandez and Jorge Garcia-Hombrados
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Andres Barrios-Fernández and Jorge Garcia Hombrados

No 17070, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison in the two years following their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging desistance from crime has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates. This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to provide causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood to which inmates return after prison matter. Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders by 11 percentage points. This effect represents a drop of 18% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We discuss three classes of mechanisms---social support, promotion of Evangelical values, and social monitoring---and provide evidence consistent with the first of them. Our results suggest that interventions that give recently released inmates access to local support networks could play an important role in encouraging crime desistance.

Keywords: Crime desistance; Recidivism; Neighborhood institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H42 J4 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17070 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Recidivism and neighborhood institutions: evidence from the rise of the evangelical church in Chile (2021)
Working Paper: Recidivism and neighborhood institutions: evidence from the rise of the evangelical church in Chile (2021)
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:cpr:ceprdp:17070

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17070

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().