PRISON CONDITIONS AND RECIDIVISM

Prison Conditions and Recidivism

Prison Conditions and Recidivism

Introduction

In modern criminal justice systems, imprisonment is the most important form of sanction. In the last decade prison population has grown substantially in many countries. Figure 1 reports the trends in the growth rates of prison population from mid-nineties. Compared to the index year of 1995, the number of inmates per 100,000 residents increased by 2004 from 600 to 723 in the U.S., from 99 to 149 in the U.K. and from 87 to 96 in Italy. Given that an immediate consequence of the growth in prison population is a possible worsening of life conditions in prisons, a relevant issue is understanding how the conditions of incarceration affect the propensity to commit criminal acts. Two individuals convicted for one year of imprisonment may serve their sentence in two prisons characterized by different conditions and thus face different degrees of punishment.(Bedard,2004)

This means that the conditions of incarceration may have an impact on the actual sanctions determined by imprisonment and hence on the propensity to engage in future criminal activities. Moreover, the large majority of inmates are not condemned to a life sentence, which obviously means that sooner or later they will be released. Given this, it is important to understand how prison conditions affect a former inmate's probability of committing another crime. From a policy perspective, changing prison conditions could be relatively easier and less costly than other interventions (e.g. increasing incapacitation through sentences) that aim to reduce former inmates' post release criminal activity. Only a few works use aggregate data to analyze the consequences of incarceration conditions on criminal behavior. Katz, Levitt, and Shustorovich (2003), using death rates among prisoners as a proxy for prison conditions, show that more punitive facilities have a small but statistically significant deterrent effect.

Discussion

Exploiting aggregate data on crime rates, they find a decline in local crime rates where prison conditions measured by death rates are harsher. This result conforms to the deterrence hypothesis according to which a higher cost of crime deters prospective criminals from committing a criminal act (Becker, 1968). Bedard and Helland (2004) exploit the expansion of the female penal system capacity in the United States to study the deterrent effects of increasing the distance of prisons from cities. They find that, on average, increasing this distance (assumed to coincide with a reduced number of inmate visits) tends to lower the female crime rate. Overall, evidence from previous research resorting to aggregate data suggests that harsher prison conditions deter individuals from committing criminal acts.

The previously cited works share two main weaknesses. First, in testing how prison conditions affect crime rates, one cannot exclude the possibility that the measures of prison conditions are endogenous to crime rates. Second, these works do not clarify whether the singled out deterrent effect of punitiveness is induced by deterring potential criminals, by deterring former inmates, or both.In this paper we focus on how prison conditions, measured by several indicators affect recidivism of former ...