RT Article
T1 Prison commitments, crime, and unemployment: A theoretical and empirical specification for the United States, 1933–1985
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 7
IS 2
SP 155
OP 199
A1 Cappell, Charles L.
A2 Sykes, Gresham
LA English
YR 1991
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1764276469
AB This paper examines sources for the changing commitment rates to U.S. state prisons (PCR) from 1933 to 1985 using a variety of time-series techniques. Theoretically, it resolves ambiguous interpretations of how crime, unemployment, and imprisonment are related. Hypotheses that crime and punishment are in equilibrium are rejected. Our final specification supports theories integrating institutionally endogenous and socially exogenous causes of prison use and includes feedback effects between crime and punishment. We reached several general conclusions. (1) Changes in PCR are due partly to changes in the levels of unemployment, age composition of the population, and military active-duty rates. (2) Effects of the criminal justice system, captured as autoregressive institutional drift, account for approximately half of the year-to-year fluctuations in the PCR. The contemporaneous prison discharge rate also influences the rate of prison commitments. (3) Neither the specified nor the unspecified institutional effects mediate the effects of other exogenous variables. (4) Under most simultaneous-equation specifications, the crime rate is moderately influenced by the contemporaneous unemployment rate and strongly influenced by prior levels of prison commitments. The preferred simultaneous causal model estimates a modest positive coefficient for the unemployment-crime causal path and a substantial positive coefficient for the unemployment-prison commitment causal path.
K1 structural equations
K1 Time series
K1 imprisonment and unemployment
K1 Crime
DO 10.1007/BF01268628