Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extrajudicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are used primarily as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers' costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extrajudicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are primarily used as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized 65...