Short- and long-term effects of imprisonment on future felony convictions and prison admissions.

ABSTRACT: A substantial contributor to prison admissions is the return of individuals recently released from prison, which has come to be known as prison's "revolving door." However, it is unclear whether being sentenced to prison itself has a causal effect on the probability of a subsequent return to prison or on criminal behavior. To examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison on subsequent offending and reimprisonment, we leverage a natural experiment using the random assignment of judges with different propensities for sentencing offenders to prison. Drawing on data on all individuals sentenced for a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006, we compare individuals sentenced to prison to those sentenced to probation, taking into account sentence lengths and stratifying our analysis by

SUBMITTER: Harding DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5651733 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature