CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 130Criminal Justice and Corrections AnalysisCriminal Justice and PenologyLaw, Economics, and Judicial Systems

More Time, Less Crime? Estimating the Incapacitative Effect of Sentence Enhancements

Open access
Owens, Emily G.·2009·The Journal of Law and Economics
DOI 10.1086/593141
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Sentence enhancements can reduce crime by causing potential offenders to change their behavior and by removing dangerous offenders from society for longer periods of time. I estimate the incapacitative effect of longer sentences by exploiting a 2001 change in Maryland sentencing guidelines that reduced the sentence of 23, 24 and 25 year old males with delinquent records by a mean of 222 days per delinquent 'point'. I find that during this sentence 'disenhancement', offenders were on average arrested for 2.8 criminal acts and were involved in between 1.4 and 1.6 index crimes per person during the period in which they would have otherwise been incarcerated. While significantly lower than previous estimates of incapacitation, I find that on the margin, the social cost of the crimes averted by incapacitation is slightly higher than the marginal cost to the state of imposing a one year sentence enhancement.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/593141

Cites

55 of 55 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Much of the literature focuses on incapacitation effects, finding reductions in crime while offenders are in prison.

    “Much of this literature focuses on incapacitation effects, finding reductions in crime while offenders are in prison.”

    From Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment (2020) · cites this paper as Owens (2009)

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 56 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Owens, E. G.
Affiliations
Cornell University (US)
Corresponding author
Owens, Emily G.
ORCID
Owens, Emily G.
Venue
The Journal of Law and Economics
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2009-08
Volume
52
Issue
3
Pages
551-579
ISSN
  • 0022-2186 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5285
DOI
10.1086/593141
OpenAlex
W2124930152
Cited by
130
References
56
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 10
FWCI
23.82
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • The Journal of Law and Economics (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
  • bepress Legal Repository (submittedVersion)
  • eCommons (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
  • Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
Keywords
sentence enhancement, incapacitation, recidivism, juvenile delinquency, sentencing guidelines, crime deterrence, social costs of crime

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review