Séminaire

Incarcerate one to calm the others: Spillover effects of prison among criminal groups

Arnaud Philippe (IAST-TSE)

18 avril 2017, 14h00–15h30

Salle MS001

TSE internal seminars

Résumé

This paper documents the effect of peers’ incarceration on an individual’s criminal activity among small criminal groups. Starting with people convicted in the same case—and thus considered to be an established criminal group—I built a 48-month panel that records criminal status, imprisonment status and imprisonment status of peers. Panel regressions with individual fixed effects show that an individual’s probability of reoffending diminishes when a peer is in prison. This effect is sizable and represents around 5% of the incapacitation effect of an individual’s own incarceration. Moreover, the effect depends on offenders’ position in the group. The person identified by judges as more responsible—the one who received the most severe sentence of the group during the joint trial— or the person with the longest criminal record is not affected by later incarcerations of his or her peers. Those results are consistent with the idea that “leaders” are not affected by the incarceration of “followers”. Digging into the mechanisms, I provide evidence that crime reduction is driven for group of two by the diminution of risky behaviour among offenders who remain free, and for larger groups, it is driven by “criminal capital” loss.