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

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Humphries, John Eric; Ouss, Aurelie; Stavreva, Kamelia; Stevenson, Megan T.; Van Dijk, Winnie
• 署名单位: Yale University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Pennsylvania; Columbia University; University of Virginia
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjaf040
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 2907-2962
• 关键词: PRETRIAL DETENTION; crime; substitutes; supervision; assignment; EMPLOYMENT; probation; records; models; IMPACT

摘要

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every person 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.