In an era of scarce public resources, many jurisdictions are being forced to take drastic measures to address severe budgetary constraints on the administration of criminal justice. As prosecutors’ offices around the nation are being scaled back and enforcement priorities are being narrowed,...

Criminal sentencing policy has moved into the spotlight over the last two decades, as determinate sentencing and greater democratic oversight have brought new scrutiny to the question of how we punish. Much of the focus has been on two facts: first, that the United States incarcerates a...

The standard economic theory of crime deterrence predicts that the conviction of an innocent (type-I error) is as detrimental to deterrence as the acquittal of a guilty individual (type-II error). In this paper, we qualify this result theoretically, showing that in the presence of risk aversion,...

The academic debate over the deterrent effect of capital punishment has intensified again with a major policy outcome at stake. About two dozen empirical studies have recently emerged that explore the issue. Donohue and Wolfers (2005) claim to have examined the recent studies and shown the...

This article considers the social desirability of prison work programs in a model in which the function of imprisonment is to deter crime. Two types of prison work programs are studied — voluntary ones and mandatory ones. A voluntary work program is socially beneficial: if prisoners are paid a...

We develop a general model for finding the optimal penal strategy based on the behavioral traits of the offenders. We focus on how the discount rate (level of time discounting) affects criminal propensity on the individual level, and how the aggregation of these effects influences criminal...

When one victim's precautions against crime have spillover benefits to other victims, individuals do not take the socially optimal amount of precaution. I explore the use of criminal sanctions as a mechanism to correct this: Criminals are punished based on the level of precaution taken by the...

As illustrated by the recent Volkswagen emissions scandal and other large-scale corporate wrongdoing, business organizations and top executives with disclosure duties learn to be willfully blind to what is happening inside their organizations. Under pressure for results without inquiry into...

When one victim's precautions against crime have spillover benefits to other victims, individuals do not take the socially optimal amount of precaution. I explore the use of criminal sanctions as a mechanism to correct this: Criminals are punished based on the level of precaution taken by the...

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community...