penalty to the severity of the crime. We combine individual-level data on sentence length for a representative sample of US …

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 …