This paper compares actual US crime and incarceration rates to predicted rates from cross-country regressions. Global … cross-country regressions of crime and incarceration on background characteristics explain much of the variation between … other countries. But the estimated models predict only one-fourth of US incarceration and not all of US crime. The …

inmates with proxies for maximum punishment and monitoring costs across US states over 50 years. Consistent with the theory of … penalty to the severity of the crime. We combine individual-level data on sentence length for a representative sample of US …