Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?

By Christian Dippel and  Michael Poyker

Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether the presence of private prisons impact judges’ sentencing decisions in their state. We employ two identification strategies, a difference-in-difference strategy that compares only court-pairs that straddle state-borders, and an event study using the full data. We find that the opening of a private prison has a small but statistically significant and robust effect on sentence length, while public prisons do not. The effect is entirely driven by changes in sentencing in the first two months after prison openings. The combined evidence appears inconsistent with the hypothesis that private prisons may directly influence judges; instead a simple salience explanation may be the most plausible. 

The Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 66, Number 3, 2023. 52p