WORKING PAPERS

Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door. 

with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson, and Winnie van Dijk

 Conditionally accepted, Quarterly Journal of Economics

 [pdf] [NBER wp]  [Non-technical (Cato)]

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration (relative to noncarceral conviction) leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. Our empirical results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and overlooked driver of recidivism.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

150 Years of Skin Tone Inequality 

with Danny Onorato