DO CRIMINALS trade short-term gain for long-term pain? Economists have long suspected that those who commit crimes place less value on the future than law-abiding citizens. But they have mostly struggled to find hard evidence that criminals think about sentence lengths at all. A review by Steven Durlauf of the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon University found little evidence that criminals responded to harsher sentencing, and much stronger evidence that increasing the certainty of punishment deterred crime. This matters for policy, as it suggests that locking vast numbers of people in jail is not only expensive, but useless as a deterrent.
A new working paper presented at the Royal Economic Society annual conference, by Giovanni Mastrobuoni at the University of Essex and David Rivers at the University of Western Ontario, provides new evidence that the story is a little more nuanced; criminals do value the future, just not as much as the average...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1pHae9h
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