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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:21 am
Time: 3:21 am
Results for imprisonment (u.s.)
2 results foundAuthor: Harcourt, Bernard Title: Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons from the Deinstitutionalization of Mental Hospitals in the 1960s Summary: In 1963, President Kennedy outlined a federal program designed to reduce by half the number of persons in custody in mental hospitals. What followed was the biggest deinstitutionalization this country has ever seen. The historical record is complex and the contributing factors are several, but one simple fact remains: This country has deinstitutionalized before. As we think about reducing mass incarceration today, it may be useful to recall some lessons from the past. After tracing the historical background, this essay explores three potential avenues to reduce mass incarceration: First, improving mental health treatment to inmates and exploring the increased use of medication, on a voluntary basis, as an alternative to incarceration; in a similar vein, increasing the use of GPS monitoring and other biometric monitoring, and moving toward the legalization of lesser controlled substances. Second, encouraging federal leadership to create funding incentives for diversionary programs that would give states a financial motive to move prisoners out of the penitentiary and into community-based programs. Third, encouraging impact litigation of prison overcrowding, as well as documentaries of prison life, as a way to influence the public perception of prisoners. With regard to each of these strategies, however, it is crucial to avoid the further racialization of the prison population and merely transferring prisoners to equally problematic institutions. Details: Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 2011. 36p. Source: Internet Resource: University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 542 University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 335: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1748796 Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1748796 Shelf Number: 122414 Keywords: DeinstitutionalizationImprisonment (U.S.)JailsMass IncarcerationMental HealthMentally IllPrisons |
Author: Johnson, Rucker Title: How Much Crime Reduction Does the Marginal Prisoner Buy? Summary: We present new evidence on the effect of aggregate changes in incarceration on changes in crime that accounts for the potential simultaneous relationship between incarceration and crime. Our principal innovation is that we develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock (from whatever source) to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to permanent changes in behavior with a dynamic lag (given that only a fraction of offenders are apprehended in any one period), one can identify variation in incarceration that is not contaminated by contemporary changes in criminal behavior. We isolate this variation and use it to tease out the causal effect of incarceration on crime. Using state level data for the United States covering the period from 1978 to 2004, we find crime-prison elasticities that are considerably larger than those implied by OLS estimates. For the entire time period, we find average crime-prison effects with implied elasticities of between -0.06 and -0.11 for violent crime and between -0.15 and -0.21 for property crime. We also present results for two sub-periods of our panel: 1978 to 1990 and 1991 to 2004. Our IV estimates for the earlier time period suggest much larger crime-prison effects, with elasticity estimates consistent with those presented in Levitt (1996) who analyzes a similar time period yet with an entirely different identification strategy. For the latter time period, however, the effects of changes in prison on crime are much smaller. Our results indicate that recent increases in incarceration have generated much less bang-per-buck in terms of crime reduction. Details: Berkeley, CA: Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, 2010. 50p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 16, 2011 at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_raphael_crimeincarcJLE.pdf Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_raphael_crimeincarcJLE.pdf Shelf Number: 122415 Keywords: Cost-Benefit AnalysisCrime PreventionCrime ReductionDeterrenceImprisonment (U.S.) |