Incarceration and Crime: Evidence from California's Public Safety Realignment Reform
Incarceration and Crime: Evidence from California's Public Safety Realignment Reform
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DOI：
10.1177/0002716215599732
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发表时间：
2016-03-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Raphael, Steven
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lofstrom, Magnus;Raphael, Steven
加州最近的改革使该州的监禁率急剧而永久地下降。我们评估了监禁率下降对当地犯罪率的影响。我们的分析利用了加州各县在这一改革对县特定监狱监禁率的影响方面的巨大差异。我们发现很少有证据表明，加州监禁人数的大幅减少对暴力犯罪产生了影响，而对财产犯罪，特别是汽车盗窃产生影响的证据也很有限。这些影响远小于基于美国监禁率相当低的时期的面板数据的现有估计。我们通过对加州州犯罪率的综合队列分析证实了这些跨县结果。全国范围的分析证实了我们从县级分析的结果。与以前的研究一致，这项研究的结果支持犯罪监狱效应的假设，随着对监禁的依赖增加而减少。
Recent reforms in California caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the state's incarceration rate. We evaluate the effects of that incarceration decline on local crime rates. Our analysis exploits the large variation across California counties in the effect of this reform on county-specific prison incarceration rates. We find very little evidence that the large reduction in California incarceration had an effect on violent crime, and modest evidence of effects on property crime, auto theft in particular. These effects are considerably smaller than existing estimates based on panel data for periods of time when the U.S. incarceration rate was considerably lower. We corroborate these cross-county results with a synthetic-cohort analysis of state crime rates in California. The statewide analysis confirms our findings from the county-level analysis. In line with with previous research, the results from this study support the hypothesis of a crime-prison effect that diminishes with increased reliance on incarceration.