Do Privately-Owned Prisons Increase Incarceration Rates?

Gregmar Galinato () and Ryne Rohla

No 2018-6, Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

Abstract: This article measures the effect of establishing private prisons on incarceration-related outcomes in the United States. We develop a model to show that enforcement authorities faced with capacity constraints or who are more susceptible to bribes set non-optimal sanction levels which increase a total number of incarcerated individuals and each individual’s sentence length. Using instrumental variables regressions at the state and individual levels, we find evidence showing that a rise in private prison beds per capita increases the number of incarcerated individuals per capita and average sentencing lengths. The effect is more likely for crime types when there is more sentencing leeway such as fraud, regulatory, drug or weapons crimes. The effect of private prisons is more pronounced in states where prison capacity constraints are met or exceeded.

Keywords: Private prisons; sentencing; lobbying; incarceration; capacity constraint; corruption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2018-09-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ses.wsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Revised-Prison-LE-draft-fin.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://ses.wsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Revised-Prison-LE-draft-fin.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://ses.wsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Revised-Prison-LE-draft-fin.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/uploads/cahnrs/2019/09/Revised-Prison-LE-draft-fin.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do privately-owned prisons increase incarceration rates? (2020)
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:ris:wsuwpa:2018_006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University PO Box 646210, Pullman, WA 99164-646210. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Dahl ().