Women Behind Bars: Do Single-Gender Prisons Reduce Recidivism?

Francesca Calamunci, Gianmarco Daniele, Giovanni Mastrobuoni and Daniele Terlizzese

No 20236, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: In 143 countries incarcerated women serve their sentence in a typically small separate section within prisons that mainly house male inmates, while 79 countries have prisons exclusively dedicated to women. Exploiting data from Italy, where both prison types coexist, and a quasi-random institutional assignment rule, we find that women-only prisons lower three-year recidivism by up to 16 percentage points. We use policy-relevant treatment effects to identify the optimal location of an additional women-only prison. As for the mechanisms, a driver is the presence of a large enough number of women for a given facility.

Keywords: Women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 K14 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
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