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The Silence of the Lambdas: Deterring Incapacitation Research

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Abstract

This essay provides an economist’s perspective on criminological research into incapacitation effects on crime. Our central argument is that criminologists would do well to substantially scale back the enterprise of trying to estimate the various behavioral parameters central to a micro-level approach to measuring incapacitation effects, including the annual rate of offending outside of prison (λ) and the lengths of criminal careers. One problem with this line of research is practical: for example, mean estimates of self-reported criminal activity by incarcerated prisoners are quite sensitive to reports by the most criminally active offenders. But the larger concern is conceptual—the incapacitation effects from a given change in sentencing policy may be undermined by the possibility of replacement effects, and at the same time omit other benefits that may arise from deterrent effects on crime. A more promising approach is to identify plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policy in order to estimate the net impact on crime from the combined effects of incapacitation, deterrence and replacement.

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Notes

  1. Others have also pointed out the problems with the incapacitation literature in criminology; see for example Zimring and Hawkins (1995) and Donohue and Siegelman (1998). Yet the interest in estimating pure incapacitation effects in criminology persists, perhaps in part because criminologists do not accept the conceptual challenges posed by the possibility of deterrence and replacement effects.

  2. Jeffrey Smith reminds us that if there are diminishing marginal returns to any activity then the optimal research portfolio will include both pure incapacitation studies and “natural experiment” studies. Given the relative rarity of criminological studies that attempt to estimate the net effects on crime from incapacitation, deterrence and replacement using plausibly exogenous natural experiments, there is room for a substantial shift in research activities from the former to the latter.

  3. BCA requires that benefits and costs be converted to a common dollar metric. This is the approach that Becker (1968) took in articulating the modern economic framework for analyzing social policy toward crime and that Ehrlich (1981) took in articulating the first economic model distinguishing deterrence and incapacitation. All subsequent economic research on crime has also adopted this approach (e.g., Donohue and Siegelman 1998). This metric is imperfect because important aspects of human experience, such as emotions, do not translate well into monetary equivalents.

  4. For example as Cook (1980) notes, experience within one’s social network provides a plausible alternative mechanism for deriving information about sentencing policies.

  5. When the Earned Income Tax Credit increases the after-tax wage at the bottom of the income distribution there is a resulting change in labor supply by low-income workers (Eissa and Liebman,1996). When parents have a strong tax incentive to have their babies before January 1, there is an increase in the likelihood that children are born during the last week of December rather than first week of January (Dickert-Conlin and Chandra 1999). When malpractice liability declines, doctors are less likely to practice defensive medicine (Kessler and McClellan 1996). When the costs of obtaining an abortion are reduced through legalization, abortion rates increase (Ananat et al. 2006).

  6. Note also that another potential mechanism by which a prison policy may influence the crime rate is the extent of private precautions (Philipson and Posner 1996). The evidence on this point is extremely limited.

  7. Perhaps too obvious to mention is that the largest opportunity cost is often the net benefit of the alternative policy that could have been pursued in lieu of the chosen policy. If for example the marginal $1 billion in the federal government goes to new prisons rather than the NIH then the opportunity cost of the marginal expansion to federal prisons could in principle be the failure to cure some dreadful disease.

  8. Not all criminologists believe that research on lambda is useful. For example, Laub and Sampson (2001) characterize this research as having attained a “point of stagnation ... because of its narrow focus on measurement and policy.”

  9. The alternative approach of relying on administrative arrest data is widely recognized to under-state criminal activity, and any effort to project from arrests to crimes will employ some inflation factor that necessarily requires some use of survey reports about criminal activity.

  10. Donohue and Siegelman (1998) make the parallel point about comparing the stock of inmates and the flow of inmates who are about to be released. Offenders with shorter sentences are those more likely to be released, and their offending rates are surely lower than those who receive longer sentences. The average lambda of inmates will therefore be a biased estimate of the offending rate of the marginal releasee and will overstate the benefit of delaying release dates.

  11. While some criminologists, such as Canela-Cacho et al. (1997), have focused on selection as offenders enter the criminal justice system and filter through its stages, less often have criminologists developed estimates for offenders who are filtering out of the system.

  12. See for example the discussion of Ehrlich’s (1973) seminal work by the National Research Council’s report on the early deterrence literature (Blumstein et al. 1978).

  13. As Meyer (1995, p. 151) notes, “[t]he natural experiment approach emphasizes the general issue of understanding the sources of variation used to estimate the key parameters ... If one cannot experimentally control the variation one is using, one should understand its source.”

  14. Those states in which overcrowding lawsuits have been filed at all are not systematically different from other states in the sense that such cases have been filed in almost every state in the nation (plus DC).

  15. Federal as well as state court decisions can sometimes provide sources of useful natural experiments, as for example occurred when the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision changed the “cost” of abortion nationwide. See Ananat et al. (2006) for a summary of this research.

  16. For example Ludwig and Cook (2000) take advantage of the fact that the Brady Act’s requirements for gun-dealer background checks and waiting periods took effect in 1994 in some states but not others. State fixed effects help account for the fact that states affected and not affected by Brady may be systematically different with respect to permanently higher or lower rates of crime, while the fact that the timing of the Brady Act’s provisions were determined by the federal government rather than local states helps overcome concerns about endogeneity in the timing of the policy implementation.

  17. Why crime rates would increase at the age of majority in systems with the most punitive juvenile justice systems is not clear, but could be driven in part by whatever factors cause offending rates to increase in general by age starting in early adolescence.

  18. Recently, economists have taken a step in the direction of evaluating the ex ante benefits of crime control by employing contingent valuation methods to estimate the willingness-to-pay for crime reductions. In this approach, a survey asks individuals how much they would be willing to pay in order to achieve a particular policy outcome, here reductions in crime, by essentially constructing a hypothetical “market” situation. An advantage of this approach is that the responses reflect ex ante expectations of the benefits that are anticipated to accrue rather than ex post attempts to compensate victims. Also, the responses also measure the respondent’s fear of victimization as well as concern for others, such as family and the broader community, which may not correlate with the risk of victimization. Using this method, Cook and Ludwig (2001) estimated that the average household was willing to pay more than $200 to reduce gun violence by 30%, and this implies a willingness to pay about $1 million to prevent each gun injury. Cohen et al. (2004) using similar methods estimated willingness to pay to prevent crime of approximately $25,000 per burglary, $232,000 per armed robbery, and $9.7 million per murder.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Chicago Law School, 1111 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Thomas J. Miles

  2. University of Chicago, 969 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Jens Ludwig

  3. NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Jens Ludwig

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  1. Thomas J. Miles
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Correspondence to Thomas J. Miles.

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Miles, T.J., Ludwig, J. The Silence of the Lambdas: Deterring Incapacitation Research. J Quant Criminol 23, 287–301 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-007-9031-5

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