America’s Prisons: Warehouses or Criminal Creators?

With the national prison population on the rise and the cost of corrections reaching $80 billion, scholars are searching to uncover the impacts of imprisonment on life outcomes. Ex-offenders have chronically high rates of unemployment and recidivism, but what is the true cause of these adverse outcomes? Certain theories argue that imprisonment itself interrupts adult development and socializes prisoners into more criminal activity, while others believe a record of imprisonment stigmatizes ex-offenders in the eyes of potential employers.

In “Does Imprisonment Alter the Life Course? Evidence on Crime and Employment from a Natural Experiment,” author Charles E. Loeffler dives into the theory that social selection accounts for the majority of adverse life outcomes among ex-prisoners. In other words, do prisons merely warehouse individuals predisposed to disadvantages before releasing them basically unchanged? To study this question, Loeffler looks at evidence from the Circuit Court of Cook County, in which defendants are randomly assigned to judges who have varying levels of sentencing patterns. Using this natural experiment, he finds no significant differences in recidivism or employment outcomes based on imprisonment as compared to probation or supervision.

Utilizing assignment to judges as an instrumental variable, Loeffler focuses on the variation in prison sentences that is an outcome of judicial assignment rather than of crime, individual background, or other confounding characteristics. Loeffler controls for baseline characteristics, prior convictions, and the seriousness of the crime to isolate the effect of prison separate from these factors and uses two-stage least-squares regressions to estimate the impacts of imprisonment on future crime and employment.

Using felony arrests within five years as a proxy for recidivism, Loeffler first performs a simple regression and estimates a nine percent higher rate of recidivism for those imprisoned. However, once adding in controls and performing the two-stage least-squares regression to identify the independent effects of prison, he finds no significant effect of imprisonment on recidivism. Similarly with employment, he finds a strong negative correlation between imprisonment and employment at five years after conviction when using a simple regression, but upon using controls and two-stage least-squares he finds no statistically significant effect. The most explanatory variables in determining recidivism and employment outcomes are background characteristics, previous criminal history, and previous employment—not an individual’s assignment to prison.

It is important to note that this study is measuring the impacts of post-conviction imprisonment by comparing the outcomes of those sent to prison versus those given probation or supervision. It does not, however, measure the impact of pre-trial detainment, which in Cook County can be quite substantial. Pre-trial detainment, stigmatism of a conviction record, and community-based supervisions may still have significant impacts on life outcomes for ex-offenders. Loeffler explains that post-conviction imprisonment, as opposed to probation or supervision, seems to have no independent adverse effect on recidivism or employment. Prisons may be seen, instead, as custodial institutions that interrupt but do not significantly alter the life-course trajectory of offenders.

Childhood and early life experiences, therefore, become important in determining the cause of disadvantages. A similar study investigating the impacts of juvenile imprisonment, interestingly, found results opposite of Loeffler’s: childhood prison sentences do have significant adverse effects on adult crime and high school graduation. Future policy decisions should take into consideration long-term impacts of juvenile detention and the most cost-effective alternatives to adult imprisonment.

Feature Photo: cc/(vgm8383)