By Armando N. Meier, Jonathan Levav, Stephan Meier, Liora G. Avnaim:

Does early release decrease or increase the probability that ex-convicts will return to prison? We exploit unique data from Israeli courts, where appearance before the judge throughout the day has an arbitrary component. We first show that judges more often deny parole requests of prisoners appearing further from the judges' last break. We then use this arbitrary variation in early releases and find that early releases reduce the propensity of prisoners to return to prison. Robustness checks suggest that later and earlier cases are largely comparable and that potential selection is unlikely to explain the results.

IZA DP No. 18076 Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2025. 107p.

By Catalina Franco Buitrago, David J. Harding, Shawn D. Bushway, and Jeffrey D. Morenoff

We find that people involved in low-level crime receiving a prison sentence are more likely than those with non-prison sentences to be re-imprisoned due to technical violations of parole, rather than due to new crimes. We identify the extent and cost of this incapacitation effect among individuals with similar criminal histories using exogenous variation in sentence type from discontinuities in Michigan Sentencing Guidelines. Technical violations disproportionately affect drug users and those first arrested as juveniles. Higher re-imprisonment adds one-quarter to the original sentence’s incapacitation days while only preventing low-severity crime, suggesting that prison is cost-ineffective for individuals on the margin.

NHH Dept. of Economics Discussion Paper No. 03/2022, 79p.