Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly-Assigned Judges

NBER Working Paper No. 19102

Issued in June 2013

NBER Program(s):Children, Economics of Education, Law and Economics, Labor Studies, Public Economics



Over 130,000 juveniles are detained in the US each year with 70,000 in detention on any given day, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts social and human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on high school completion and adult recidivism. Estimates based on over 35,000 juvenile offenders over a ten-year period from a large urban county in the US suggest that juvenile incarceration results in large decreases in the likelihood of high school completion and large increases in the likelihood of adult incarceration. These results are in stark contrast to the small effects typically found for adult incarceration, but consistent with larger impacts of policies aimed at adolescents.

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Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w19102

Published: A. Aizer & J. J. Doyle, 2015. "Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital, and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 130(2), pages 759-803. citation courtesy of

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