Do legal origins affect cross-country incarceration rates?

D’Amico, Daniel J.; Williamson, Claudia R.

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2014.11.002

Cited by 32 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Second, the extant literature has failed to engage the persistence of incarcerations. The contemporary literature has fundamentally focused on inter alia: risk assessment in sentencing decisions as a remedy to mass incarceration (Kopkin et al, 2017); intersectional analysis on parallels between mass deportation and mass incarceration (Tanya, 2017); factors affecting the use of drug during incarceration (Rao et al, 2016); the role of legal origins in cross-country incarcerations (D'Amico & Williamson, 2015); whether restorative justice reduces incarceration (Wood, 2015); the incarceration of substantially traumatized adolescents (Mallet, 2015); factors of delinquency among incarcerated male juveniles (Olashore et al, 2017); nexus between public health, mass incarceration and inequality (Wilderman & Wang, 2017) and supporting strategies for children and families that are affected by parental incarceration (Kjellstrand, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Persistence in incarcerations: global comparative evidence

Asongu

2018

JCRPP

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess how incarcerations persist across the world. The focus is on 163 countries for the period 2010-2015. Design/methodology/approach The empirical evidence is based on generalized method of moments. In order to increase room for policy implications, the data set is decomposed into sub-samples based on income levels, religious domination, openness to the sea, regional proximity and legal origins. Findings The following main findings are established. Incarcerations are more persistent in low income, Christian-protestant and Latin American countries while comparative evidence is not feasible on the basis of landlockedness and legal origins owing to unfavorable post-estimation diagnostic tests. Justifications for the comparative advantages and relevance of findings to theory building in public economics are discussed. Practical implications First, income levels matter in the persistence of incarcerations because low-income nations vis-à-vis their high-income counterparts have less financial resources with which to prevent and deal with events like terrorism, political instability and violence that lead to incarcerations. Second, the intuition for religious domination builds on the fact that liberal societies can be more associated with incarcerations compared to conservative societies. The main theoretical contribution of this study to the literature is that the authors have built on empirical validity to provide theoretical justification as to why categorizing countries on the basis of selected fundamental characteristics determine cross-country variations in incarcerations. Such evidence is important for theory building in public economics. Originality/value It is important for policy makers to understand the persistence of incarcerations across nations because resources could be allocated to regions and countries, contingent on the relative importance of future incarceration tendencies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Persistence in incarcerations: global comparative evidence

Asongu

2018

JCRPP

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“…Among other findings, civil law regimes are more likely to impose military conscription (Mulligan and Shleifer, 2005), to have government ownership of media (Djankov et al, 2003) and banks La Porta et al (2002), to strictly regulate labor markets (Botero et al, 2004), to favor a heavier hand of government ownership and more hierarchical regulation (La Porta et al, 2008;D'Amico and Williamson, 2015), and to be more comfortable with a centralized and activist government than common law regimes (Mahoney, 2001). Adding to this literature, our findings suggest that donation laws also tend to reflect the polity's default position on broader conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the state (Healy, 2005).…”

Section: Discussion and Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Origins, Religion and Health Outcomes: A Cross-Country Comparison of Organ Donation Laws

et al. 2018

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This paper investigates what drives countries to legislate presumed consent-making citizens organ donors by default unless they opt out-instead of explicit consent. A wide range of economic, social, political, institutional, and demographic variables is used. Results reveal the following: (i) civil law predicts presumed consent, which uncovers a mechanism by which an institution that long pre-dates transplantation medicine has an impact on current health outcomes; (ii) Protestantism predicts explicit consent; and (iii) higher pro-social behavior decreases the likelihood of presumed consent. The plausible mechanisms and implications are discussed.

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“…Although correlations between deeply embedded historical processes and contemporary incarceration outcomes are strong and robust (D'Amico and Williamson, 2015), changes have occurred and are likely to continue into the future. However, our model implies a certain degree of conceptual priority to reform processes that influence and affect the organizational differences across entire spheres of legality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The punitive consequences of organizational structures in England, France and the United States

D’Amico

Williamson

2018

Journal of Institutional Economics

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We develop a framework for understanding how legal structures relate to imprisonment. We hypothesize that relatively more hierarchy within criminal justice institutions, compared to commercial law, fosters higher rates of incarceration. Our framework predicts that incarceration reflects asymmetric opportunities for rent seeking across differently organized legal institutions. Instead of comparing criminal justice institutions across nations in absolute terms, we investigate the relative degrees of institutional centralization across legal spheres. To provide support, we document the separate historical experiences that shaped divergent organizations across England and France. Within each country, criminal legal institutions developed inverse organizational traits from commercial legal processes. As a result, the contrasting organizations created asymmetric opportunities for rent seeking. Divergent contemporary outcomes can be understood by recognizing these initial organizational choices, the relative opportunities they created, and their subsequent path dependencies. We document contemporary England, France, and the United States’ incarceration trends and penal outcomes to provide empirical support.

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Do legal origins affect cross-country incarceration rates?

Cited by 32 publications

References 69 publications

Persistence in incarcerations: global comparative evidence

Persistence in incarcerations: global comparative evidence

Legal Origins, Religion and Health Outcomes: A Cross-Country Comparison of Organ Donation Laws

The punitive consequences of organizational structures in England, France and the United States

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