| This dissertation contains three essays analyzing how institutions affect punishment choices and levels of offending.;The first chapter, based on work with Alexander Peysakhovich, studies the political economy of punishment and the psychology of retribution. It investigates what parameters affect punishment decisions, and how individual decisions aggregate up. Using lab experiments, we test the relevance of several parameters: cost structures, probability of apprehension, and others' punishment behaviors. We find that individual punishment decisions respond to individual costs, not social costs; that punishers do not account for probability of violator apprehension; and that punishment by others is not a perfect substitute for own punishment. These combined effects indicate that aggregating individual decision rarely leads to punishment levels in line with benchmarks such as optimal deterrence.;The second chapter studies how funding and expenditure structures affect penal policy. Policing and sentencing are decided at the local level, but imprisonment is paid for by states. This disjointed organization of the criminal justice could affect local penal policies and crime levels, depending on externalities. I use the 1996 California Juvenile Justice Realignment, which modified the financial structure of juvenile corrections, as a natural experiment and find that shifting the cost of incarceration from the state to counties led to a discontinuous drop in the number of juveniles being incarcerated to state facilities, but no discontinuous change in juvenile arrests. These results indicate the potential importance of financial structures in penal policies, in ways that are not in line with optimal deterrence or incapacitation.;The third chapter investigates how interactions in prison influence post-release behavior. Using French administrative data from 2008 to 2011, which includes cell allocation, I study interactions across cellmates' post-release behavior, depending on self and cellmates' motives of incarceration. I can precisely determine who one interacts with while in prison, and define measures for intensity of interaction in prison. I find evidence of peer effects in recidivism for offenses that require a set of skills or connections. This paper contributes to the peer effects literature, by varying the definition of peer effects amongst two dimensions: length of interaction, and number of interactions. |
