定罪、监禁与再犯: 理解旋转门现象

Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025 · [{"name": "John Eric Humphries", "affiliation": ["National Bureau of Economic Research", "Yale University"]}, {"name": "Aurélie Ouss", "affiliation": ["National Bureau of Economic Research", "Institute of Criminology"]}, {"name": "Kamelia Stavreva", "affiliation": ["University of Missouri", "Columbia University"]}, {"name": "Megan T. Stevenson", "affiliation": ["University of Virginia"]}, {"name": "Winnie van Dijk", "affiliation": ["National Bureau of Economic Research", "Yale University"]}]

中文摘要

摘要非监禁定罪是刑事法院案件的一种常见结果：每有一人被监禁，约有三人近期被定罪但未被判处监狱或看守所监禁。我们将二元处理的法官工具变量（IV）框架扩展到具有多重处理的情形，并用其研究非监禁定罪的后果。我们阐明了一组假设，在这些假设下，广泛使用的两阶段最小二乘（2SLS）回归能够识别特定边际的处理效应；我们将这些假设与法官决策模型相联系，并推导出一个表达式，用以直观说明当关于法官决策的一项关键假设不满足时，渐近偏误的方向与量级。我们发现，相对于撤诉，非监禁定罪会使弗吉尼亚州重罪被告的再犯率出现大幅且持久的上升。相比之下，相对于非监禁定罪，监禁会使再犯率在短期内下降，这与（监禁的）剥夺犯罪能力效应相一致。我们的实证结果表明，非监禁重罪定罪是再犯的一个重要且被忽视的驱动因素。

Abstract

Abstract Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every person incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration (relative to noncarceral conviction) leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. Our empirical results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and overlooked driver of recidivism.