I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data from Italy and combining quasi-experimental and structural econometric methods to achieve both a credible identification and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing...

The problem of American prisons has become one of the most pressing political problems of our time. This paper reconsiders the 1831 travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in order to situate the prison as institution born of American democracy. While most studies isolate and...