This research inspects the general implications of considering duration of confinement as a deduction to the convicted consumer-worker time endowment. Even if analytically simple, the model is able to shed some light on the expected wage profile of criminals, and the pattern of their...

Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...