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Empirical Economics

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28-08-2017

Do parole abolition and Truth-in-Sentencing deter violent crimes in Virginia?

Authors: Qi Li, Wei Long

Published in: Empirical Economics | Issue 4/2018

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Abstract

This paper examines the treatment effect of the justice reform enacted on January 1, 1995, in Virginia. Using FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data about crime rates per 100,000 population from 1960 to 2010, we find that after the reform the reported aggregated violent crime rate declined significantly and is mainly driven down by the decrease in robbery. We also consider property crime and find that the reported property crime rate does not decline until 4 years later, indicating that the justice reform in Virginia also has lagged treatment effect on property crime.

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For details, the first chapter of Parole: Then & Now by Texas Senate Research Center provides an excellent reference.

Trends in State parole, 1990–2000, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001.

According to Virginia Department of Correction, mandatory parole is “the automatic release of an offender six months before completion of his or her sentence.” Unlike discretionary parole, parole board members might impose some special conditions for this type of parole but will not make the parole decision through voting.

Table 5 of Trends in State Parole, 1990–2000, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001.

Trends in State parole, 1990–2000, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001.

For details, see page 20, Chapter 2 of The Influences of Truth-in-Sentencing Reforms on Changes in States’ Sentencing Practices and Prison Populations.

Utah does not have Truth-in-Sentencing statutes but received federal grant funding on the basis of its Truth-in-Sentencing practices.

We have also used the AIC standard for state selections and actually get quite similar results. AICC is a more conservative model selection standard and prefers more parsimonious model. Thus, in the remaining part of the paper, the optimal models are all selected under AICC.

We thank one referee for pointing this out.

We thank a referee for the suggestion of conducting the add-covariates robustness check.

We thank one referee for pointing this out.

The sources of those data sets are FBI, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau.

We thank one referee for pointing this out.

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Title: Do parole abolition and Truth-in-Sentencing deter violent crimes in Virginia?
Authors: Qi Li
Wei Long
Publication date: 28-08-2017
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Empirical Economics / Issue 4/2018
Print ISSN: 0377-7332
Electronic ISSN: 1435-8921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-017-1332-4

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