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August 11, 2024

"Truth in Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism"

The title of this post is the title of this notable recent empirical paper authored by David Macdonald available via SSRN. (Hat tip to this recent episode of the podcast Probable Causation for highlighting the paper and bringing it to my attention.)   Here is its abstract:

Truth in Sentencing laws eliminate discretion in prison release.  This decreases the incentive for rehabilitative effort among prisoners.  I use a regression discontinuity design to exploit a change in these incentives created by the introduction of TIS in Arizona.  Before prison, I find that sentences were reduced by 20% for TIS offenders.  Further, I find that rule infractions increased by 22% to 55% and education enrolment fell by 24%.  After release, I find offenders were 4.8 p.p. more likely to reoffend.  I further find that recidivism and infractions effects are largest among drug and violent offenders.  Finally, I show that the reduction in sentences resulted in a broad equalization of time served at the cutoff, which indicates that the removal of early-release incentives by TIS was the main mechanism driving results.

August 11, 2024 at 05:57 PM | Permalink

Comments

"Truth in Sentencing laws eliminate discretion in prison release. This decreases the incentive for rehabilitative effort among prisoners."

Yes.

TIS was driven by public anger at cases where people with long criminal records were nonetheless released and went on to commit horrific crimes.

The public was correct to be angry about that. But, as so often happens in both politics and law, the solution to one problem created a new problem. One wants a system to account for various aims, but those aims are at times inconsistent with one another:

* Some criminals should not be released.
* Others should not have a chance to be released quickly.
* Still others should be required to demonstrate extensive rehabilitation before release.
* With the possible exception of those who will not be released, all should have an incentive to rehabilitate themselves.

All of these concerns are reasonable. All need to be balanced somehow. TIS does a good job with the first two and a poor job with the last two.

I wonder if allowing judges to use ranged sentences more frequently could make sense. Currently, that seems to exist only for the worst crimes, such as a murder sentence of 25 years to life.

But perhaps a judge should have the option of giving a sentence like "one to four years" for a wide variety of crimes, with the release happening at the discretion of a parole system?

Posted by: William Jockusch | Aug 12, 2024 12:34:03 AM

Truth in sentencing laws do nothing but disincentivize the majority of inmates from making efforts to rehabilitate themselves and just swells the prison population. Outside of inmates serving life sentences, the majority of inmates should have a parole eligibility date, and good behavior time.

I am against judges imposing "sliding scale sentences" as they are somewhat indeterminate and strip accountability for the defendant. Thus, if a person is a model inmate, takes classes and conforms to prison policy, this still may not influence an early release. However, if an inmate is given a determinate sentence of three years for example, he now knows his actual release date AND knows his behavior can lead to an early release. Therefore, he'll take classes, take up a trade, etc. in order to parole out.

Posted by: Anon | Aug 12, 2024 10:02:21 AM

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