Over the past twenty-five years, the U.S prison system has experienced continuous substantial increment in the prison population. At the same time, incarceration rates have risen by more than 300%, a phenomenon that many analysts have referred to as mass incarceration (DeFina & Hannon, 2013)....

It is difficult to know if racial discrepancies in police stop and search data are caused by racial bias or statistical discrimination. In part, this is due to uncertainty over the benchmark of unbiased police behavior: do officers aim to maximize arrests or to minimize crime? In this paper, I...

The literature contains ambiguous findings as to whether statistical discrimination, e.g. in the form of racial profiling, causes a reduction in deterrence. These analyses, however, assume that enforcers' incentives are exogenously fixed. This article demonstrates that when the costs and...

Jurisdictions across the United States have adopted "ban the box" (BTB) policies preventing employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the job application process. Their goal is to improve employment outcomes for those with criminal records, with a secondary goal of...

This paper identifies the individual components of social harm associated with a hypothetical racially motivated police encounter. An individual who believes they are being targeted by police because they are a member of a racial minority may suffer from fear of physical harm and humiliation by...

This article presents law enforcement models where employers engage in statistical discrimination, and the visibility of criminal records can be adjusted through policies (such as ban the box campaigns). I show that statistical discrimination leads to an increase in crime rates under plausible...