Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration … assessment of whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the U.S. criminal justice system. We argue … that the crime is certainly lower as results of this expansion and the crime rate in the early 1990s was likely a third …

punishment to former inmates recommitting a crime can be considered as good as randomly assigned. Based on a unique data set on … recommit a crime by 1.24 percent: this corroborates the general deterrence hypothesis. However, this effect depends on the time …