Prison, Semi-Liberty and Recidivism: Bounding Causal Effects in a Survival Model

Benjamin Monnery, François-Charles Wolff and Anaïs Henneguelle
Additional contact information
Anaïs Henneguelle: LIRIS - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de recherche en innovations sociétales - UR2 - Université de Rennes 2

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of semi-liberty as an alternative to prison on recidivism in France. Our analysis is based on a unique dataset comprising 1,445 offenders, all eligible to semi-liberty. In the absence of an instrumental variable affecting access to semi-liberty but unrelated to recidivism, we turn to selection-on-observable methods as well as sensitivity analyses to bound the causal effect of interest. Our results under treatment exogeneity (Cox regressions) and conditional independence (entropy balancing matching) show that semi-liberty is associated with a reduction of 22% to 31% in offenders' hazard of recidivism in the five years after release. The estimated effects decrease, but remain negative and significant when credible confounders are introduced. Overall, our analysis lends strong support for a beneficial effect of semi-liberty compared to prison.

Keywords: Recidivism; semi-liberty; halfway houses; prison; survival analyses; sensitivity analyses (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02423761v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in International Review of Law and Economics, 2020, 61, ⟨10.1016/j.irle.2019.105884⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02423761v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Prison, semi-liberty and recidivism: Bounding causal effects in a survival model (2020)
Working Paper: Prison, Semi-Liberty and Recidivism: Bounding Causal Effects in a Survival Model (2019)
Working Paper: Prison, Semi-Liberty and Recidivism: Bounding Causal Effects in a Survival Model (2019)
Working Paper: Prison, Semi-Liberty and Recidivism: Bounding Causal Effects in a Survival Model (2018)
Working Paper: Prison, Semi-Liberty and Recidivism: Bounding Causal Effects in a Survival Model (2018)
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:hal:journl:hal-02423761

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2019.105884

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().