Abstract
We evaluate the deterrence effects of the age of criminal responsibility on total drug trafficking and homicide crimes per age, based on a quasi-experiment generated by differences in punishment severity for these crimes prescribed by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and by the Penal Code in Brazil. To this end, information from arrests conducted by the civil and military police of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and 2017 is used to estimate the local effects of treatment through a Regression Discontinuity Design. Instead of using recidivism data and/or grouping crimes with distinct punishment severity, we use as an outcome variable the total number of arrests (crimes) per age for drug trafficking and homicides, which are the most common crimes related to organized crime in Rio de Janeiro. The results indicate that, ceteris paribus, the increase in punishment severity generated by the Penal Code can reduce the number of drug trafficking-related crimes by 9% and homicides by 37%. Through simple cost–benefit analysis, we suggest that increasing the punishment severity for minors who commit homicide could reduce juveniles’ engagement in a criminal career associated with gangs and generate gains in social well-being.
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All data and code are available under request for the authors.
Notes
Note that the problem of violence and criminality is widely spread in Brazil. Cerqueira et al. (2021) and other documents from the Brazilian Public Security Forum (FBSP) also point out the Amazon and the Northeast regions as very important geographic regions for crime in Brazil.
Carvalho and Soares (2016) estimated that 6.5% of men aged 10 to 25 living in the favelas were members of drug trafficking gangs in Rio de Janeiro (the capital of the state with the same name).
Scheper-Hughes (2004) defines structural violence as the invisible "social machinery" of social inequality and oppression that reproduces pathogenic social relations of exclusion and marginalization via ideologies and stigmas attendant on race, class, caste, sex, and other invidious distinctions.
In the appendix, we show as a placebo exercise that for crimes such as thefts, assaults, and threats, for which differences in punishment severity are not as great or are inexistent, there are no statistically significant differences in total crimes per age in the vicinity of 18 years old.
For the case of youngsters (17–19) arrested for homicides (including attempts to commit homicide and homicide), 37% of our sample were repeat offenders. Note that this re-offending percentage comes mostly from attempts to commit homicide at 42%, compared to 14% of those that committed homicide. In the case of drug trafficking crimes, the average re-offending probability was 27% for individuals aged 17–19.
By restricting the data set to the first crime as adults, we also abstract from incentives to re-offend as adults that could vary due to the Penal Code.
In the same vein, Polinsky and Shavell (1984) showed that punishment in fines is more efficient than imprisonment because the public costs of applying this type of punishment are low. Thus, following Becker (1968), the maximum pecuniary fine (the total income of the offender) would be optimal. However, the authors draw attention to the fact that this fine could be less than the loss caused by the criminal. Therefore, some combination with a period of incarceration would be optimal as long as the marginal cost of incarceration is not too high. Thus, in theoretical models, incarceration occurs as a complement to pecuniary fines and as an alternative to changes in the likelihood of punishment. Of course, this analysis disregards the fact that incarceration can also reduce crimes due to the effects of incapacitation.
It should be noted that the likelihood of punishment used in the economics of crime models is that which is perceived by the individual, which is not necessarily the true one. Bebchuk and Kaplow (1992) showed that more severe punishments are inefficient when individuals have imperfect information about punishment probability.
Loeffler and Grunwald (2015) evaluated recidivism probability through the quasi-experiment generated by the law of the State of Illinois using four-year data from drug felonies in the city of Chicago. The authors found that processing juveniles as adults reduced recidivism probability by 3 to 5 percent. Since they used data from a single felony that is not usually punished severely for first offenders, their study was not limited by the problems generated by the aggregation of crimes or by the presence of incapacitated individuals in the sample.
In addition to the limitation imposed by the use of questionable proxies, the number of homicides and the victims’ age, and the grouped data, the study combined the use of a log transformation of the data with nonlinear models (polynomials of high order) which made it impossible to know what the estimated coefficients actually mean.
Recently, Law 13,964/2019 raised the maximum penalty to 40 years.
According to a survey by the National Socio-Educational Service System from 2016, approximately 3% of juvenile incarcerations were due to theft cases. This survey showed that almost 66% of incarcerated youths are affected by this measure due to infractions against people. The survey can be accessed from the following link: http://www.mdh.gov.br/todas-as-noticias/2018/marco/Levantamento_2016Final.pdf (last accessed September 2020).
A similar situation occurs with other quite frequent crimes, such as assault and threat. These crimes are defined in articles 129 and 147 of the Penal Code that prescribes imprisonment for three months to a year and one month to six months, respectively. In other words, as for the crime of theft, first-time offenders will probably have their sentence suspended or served in the open regime.
To overcome this problem, Lee and McCrary (2017) used recidivism as an outcome variable instead of the total number of crimes. That is, the entire sample is used. Zero is assigned to the criminals who did not re-offend and those who re-offended. Thus, there is a sufficiently large amount of information to treat the age variable (discrete) as if it were continuous.
See Figure 3 in the appendix.
For robberies, the punishment provided by article 157 of the Brazilian Penal Code is the incarceration of four to ten years. However, if this punishment is less than eight years and if the defendant is a first-time offender, the sentence may be served in the semi-open regime. Therefore, there is no punishment in a closed regime. For minors, the punishment of juvenile incarceration for this crime is unlikely to be applied for the first infraction. Still, when applied (for recidivists) in the state of Rio de Janeiro, it is usually for five months of detention in a juvenile facility. So, at least for robbery, the punishment severity may be more severe for juveniles than for adults since a detention period is more likely to be sentenced for juveniles than for adults.
It is worth mentioning a very successful program in the city of Chicago titled “Become a Man,” which applies cognitive therapy to youngsters. The results of this study — which can be seen in Heller et al. (2017) — show a reduction in total arrests between 28 and 35%, a reduction of 45 to 50% in arrests for violent crimes, and an increase of 12 to 19% in completion of education levels.
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Acknowledgements
Authors would like to thank Sebastian Calonico and Pere A. Taberner for their helpful comments.
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Daniel Montolio received support from grant PID2019-109813RB-I00 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection was performed by Cristiano Oliveira. Cristiano Oliveira and Daniel Montolio performed data analysis. Cristiano Oliveira and Daniel Montolio wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and both authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Appendix
Appendix
Distribution of arrests by age for the crimes of drug trafficking and homicide (including attempts) in the state of Rio de Janeiro (2016–2017)
Distribution of arrests by age for the crime of homicide (not including attempts) in the state of Rio de Janeiro, for 2016–2017
Share of the population in the workforce and alcohol consumption by age at the state of Rio de Janeiro
Distribution of arrests by violent crimes (homicides, robberies, aggravated assault, and rapes) and robberies by age in the state of Rio de Janeiro (2016–2017)
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Montolio, D., Oliveira, C. Law incentives for juvenile recruiting by drug trafficking gangs: empirical evidence from Rio de Janeiro. Trends Organ Crim (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09478-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09478-7