《Prison Dilemma Do Education and Jobs Programmes Affect Recidivism》.pdf

Economica (2010) 77, 497–517 doi:10.1111/j.1468-0335.2008.00751.x Prison’s Dilemma: Do Education and Jobs Programmes Affect Recidivism? By NORMAN H. SEDGLEY, CHARLES E. SCOTT, NANCY A. WILLIAMS and FREDERICK W. DERRICK Loyola College in Maryland Final version received 8 February 2008. This paper employs a hazard model to analyse the impact of education and two types of prison employment programmes on recidivism over a ten-year period for 4515 prisoners released from Ohio prisons in 1992. Estimations with a Weibull mixture model and propensity score approach provide two means for investigating self-selection bias. Selection bias is detected for participation in the most common prison job programme but has little effect on estimated marginal savings impacts of prison industry and education programmes. Estimates of the cost savings from postponing return to prison due to programme participation are provided. The potential for cost savings through decreasing or delaying return to prison is an important finding given the substantial and increasing cost of incarceration. INTRODUCTION Decreasing recidivism is critical to slowing the increasing trend in the prison population and its associated costs. Over the past two decades, expenditures on corrections have grown more rapidly than any other spending category of state budgets with the exception of health care.1 With 1.57 million inmates under State or Federal jurisdiction in 2006 and an average annual growth rate of 1.9% from 2000 to 2005, the criminal justice system expects continued increases in spending (Sabol et al. 2007). Recidivism is a significant issue when one considers that over 630,000 prisoners are released