The location of women's prisons and the deterrence effect of “harder” time

Most studies of the deterrence effect of incarceration treat a year in prison as having the same deterrence effect regardless of the conditions of incarceration. In contrast, we are interested in the deterrence effect of punitiveness that is unrelated to sentence length. We focus on the punitiveness of reduced visitation associated with incarceration in institutions far from one's city of residence. Our estimation strategy takes advantage of the natural experiment created by recent expansions in the female penal system. The physical expansion of the penal system decreased the distance to prisons for some cities while increasing it for others. Our results suggest that incarceration location has a sizable deterrence effect. Increasing the average distance to a woman's prison by 40 miles reduces the female violent crime rate by approximately 6%.

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