When one victim's precautions against crime have spillover benefits to other victims, individuals do not take the socially optimal amount of precaution. I explore the use of criminal sanctions as a mechanism to correct this: Criminals are punished based on the level of precaution taken by the...

The article engages in an ideology critique of international criminal law texts and discourse, drawing on a theoretical framework developed by critical legal studies scholars in order to interrogate, in a different jurisprudential context, the assumptions undergirding contemporary international...

A common view in the law and economics literature holds that equal increases in type-1 and type-2 error lower deterrence by the same amount. We demonstrate that this view is generally incorrect both when the court's error concerns the assessment of the alleged offender's act (mistake of act) and...

In this article I examine the social desirability of rewarding prisoners for good behavior, either by reducing their sentences (granting “time off”), converting part of their sentences to a period of parole, or providing them with privileges in prison. Rewarding good behavior reduces the...

The deterrence of crime and its reduction through incapacitation are studied in a simple multiperiod model of crime and law enforcement. Optimal imprisonment sanctions and the optimal probability of sanctions are determined. A point of emphasis is that the incapacitation of individuals is often...

In this article we derive the mix of criminal sanctions—choosing among prison, parole, and probation—that achieves any target level of deterrence at least cost. We assume that prison has higher disutility and higher cost per unit time than parole and probation and that potential offenders...

We develop a general model for finding the optimal penal strategy based on the behavioral traits of the offenders. We focus on how the discount rate (level of time discounting) affects criminal propensity on the individual level, and how the aggregation of these effects influences criminal...