Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Sentencing Law and Policy

Criminal Law

: Sentencing Law and Policy

Notable new research on prison-crime connection

By Douglas A. Berman

A helpful readers pointed me to this new article, titled Specifying the Relationship Between Crime and Prisons," which appear in the June 2008 issue of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.  Here is the abstract:There is no scholarly consensus as to the proper functional form of the crime equation, particularly with regard to one critical, explanatory variable ? prison population.  The critical questions are whether crime and prison rates must be differenced, whether they are cointegrated, and whether they are simultaneously determined ? whether crime and prison cause one another.  To determine the proper specification, different researchers have applied unit-root, cointegration, and Granger tests to very similar data sets and obtained very different results...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).