A question recently posted to Quora asks how much time an inmate should sit in jail before they learn their lesson. Lukas Neville, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Asper School of Business, sheds some light on how sentences can affect recidivism.
Paul Gendreau, a psychologist at the University of New Brunswick, has studied recidivism quite seriously. He and his students wrote a government report in 2002 that reviewed the literature on this topic. Using meta-analysis (essentially an ‘analysis of analyses’, consolidating the results from many studies), he and his students found that the length of a sentence did not decrease recidivism. In fact, they found some indications that increasing sentence length may actually increase recidivism. This effect holds - and is in fact even stronger - when looking only at experimental or quasi-experimental studies where everything was held constant but the sentence length (1).
In the comments, Andy Lemke and Mike Leary also speculate about whether the severity of prison conditions might influence recidivism. M. Keith Chen from Yale’s School of Management actually looked at this, based on a discontinuity in sentencing, where very similar offenders were assigned either to minimum security prisons or higher-security prisons. He looked at the recidivism rates of offenders who were just a hair below the sentencing ‘cut score’ (who landed in minimum security) and those who were just a hair above the ‘cut’ (who were placed in higher-security prisons). Chen and his coauthor find that those who faced harsher prison conditions actually reoffended at ahigher rate (2).
(1) Smith, Goggin & Gendreau, 2002.
(2) Chen & Shapiro, 2007.
