NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
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Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?

Christian Dippel, Michael Poyker

NBER Working Paper No. 25715
Issued in March 2019, Revised in April 2020
NBER Program(s):Law and Economics, Labor Studies, Public Economics, Political Economy

Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether private prisons impact judges’ sentencing decisions in their state. We employ two identification strategies, a difference-in-difference strategy comparing court-pairs that straddle state-borders, and an event study. We find that the opening of private prisons has a large effect on sentence lengths shortly after opening but this effect dissipates once the prison is at capacity. Public prison openings have no such effects, suggesting that private prisons have an impact on criminal sentencing that public ones do not.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25715

  
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