Many criminals are more likely to go astray once they get out of prison if they faced longer sentences and more punitive conditions in prison, say economists Keith Chen of Yale University and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago.
“Harsher prison conditions are associated with significantly more post-release crime,” they report in a paper on the university Web sites, a finding that suggests doing hard time often may only produce more hard-core crooks.
For their study, Shapiro and Chen looked at convicts with virtually identical criminal histories and examined the “security risk” score each federal prisoner is given before entering prison. The rating, which ranges from zero to 36, is based on the prisoner’s rap sheet, predisposition to violence and other factors. The score determines whether an inmate is assigned to a “minimum,” “low,” “medium” or “maximum” security prison.
The researchers focused on inmates who had ratings within a few points of each other but were assigned to different security levels because they were just under or over a cutoff. Chen and Shapiro reasoned that roughly similar criminals should have roughly equal probabilities of committing crimes once they were released.
Scratch that theory: Offenders who scored barely under the cutoff point and served time in a minimum-security environment were only half as likely to commit crimes in the three years after release as those who scored just high enough to be sentenced to the next-higher security class.
So why were those crooks who did harder time twice as likely to get into trouble again? Shapiro and Chen suspect that those who fall into the higher security class are housed with more hard-core, violent criminals who may school them in illegal acts or otherwise encourage them to resume their lives of crime.
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