Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital, and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges
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aizer_doyle_juvenile_incarceration_january2015.pdf
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336.49 KB
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50687050f07d3a0370c7b80c15d6d4d7
Author(s)
Aizer, Anna
Doyle, Joseph J.
Date Issued
February 2015
Journal
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Aizer, A., and J. J. Doyle. “Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital, and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 2 (February 2, 2015): 759–803.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Over 130,000 juveniles are detained in the United States each year with 70,000 in detention on any given day, yet little is known about whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts social and human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This article uses the incarceration tendency of randomly assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on high school completion and adult recidivism. Estimates based on over 35,000 juvenile offenders over a 10-year period from a large urban county in the United States suggest that juvenile incarceration results in substantially lower high school completion rates and higher adult incarceration rates, including for violent crimes. In an attempt to understand the large effects, we found that incarceration for this population could be very disruptive, greatly reducing the likelihood of ever returning to school and, for those who do return, significantly increasing the likelihood of being classified as having an emotional or behavioral disorder.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv003
