Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720;
Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Oct 17;114(42):11103-11108. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1701544114. Epub 2017 Oct 2.
A substantial contributor to prison admissions is the return of individuals recently released from prison, which has come to be known as prison's "revolving door." However, it is unclear whether being sentenced to prison itself has a causal effect on the probability of a subsequent return to prison or on criminal behavior. To examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison on subsequent offending and reimprisonment, we leverage a natural experiment using the random assignment of judges with different propensities for sentencing offenders to prison. Drawing on data on all individuals sentenced for a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006, we compare individuals sentenced to prison to those sentenced to probation, taking into account sentence lengths and stratifying our analysis by race. Results show that being sentenced to prison rather than probation increases the probability of imprisonment in the first 3 years after release from prison by 18 percentage points among nonwhites and 19 percentage points among whites. Further results show that such effects are driven primarily by imprisonment for technical violations of community supervision rather than new felony convictions. This suggests that more stringent postprison parole supervision (relative to probation supervision) increases imprisonment through the detection and punishment of low-level offending or violation behavior. Such behavior would not otherwise result in imprisonment for someone who had not already been to prison or who was not on parole. These results demonstrate that the revolving door of prison is in part an effect of the nature of postprison supervision.
大量导致入狱的原因是刚出狱的人再次入狱，这被称为监狱的“旋转门”。然而，目前尚不清楚被判刑入狱本身是否对随后再次入狱或犯罪行为有因果影响。为了研究被判刑入狱对随后犯罪和再次入狱的因果影响，我们利用一项自然实验，该实验利用了对具有不同判刑倾向的法官进行随机分配，以将罪犯判刑入狱。我们利用 2003 年至 2006 年期间在密歇根州因重罪被判刑的所有人的数据，将被判入狱的人与被判缓刑的人进行比较，同时考虑到刑期，并按种族对我们的分析进行分层。结果表明，在非白人中，被判入狱而非缓刑会使入狱的概率在出狱后的头 3 年增加 18 个百分点，在白人中则增加 19 个百分点。进一步的结果表明，这种影响主要是通过对违反社区矫正的技术性违规行为的监禁，而不是新的重罪定罪来实现的。这表明，更严格的出狱后假释监管（相对于缓刑监管）通过发现和惩罚低级别违规或违规行为来增加监禁。否则，对于那些尚未入狱或不在假释中的人来说，这种行为不会导致入狱。这些结果表明，监狱的“旋转门”部分是出狱后监管性质的结果。
