Essays on the economics of crime and criminal justice
By: by Garrett Scott Summers
Published: 2008
Language: eng
Number of pages: 139
Description: This thesis consists of three essays applying economic analysis towards understanding the criminal justice system and crime. The first essay examines how demographic and economic fluctuations explain racial and ethnic discrimination in the criminal justice system. The second essay documents the change of gender discrimination in criminal justice over the twentieth century, and how it is conditioned by race and age. The third essay tests whether policy decisions to deter crime as predicted by economic theory have the desired effects and shows that drug prohibition enforcement is an important determinant of long run violent crime rates. The first essay documents the presence of racial and ethnic discrimination in Chicago's criminal justice system, 1870-1930. I test two hypotheses about the mechanisms behind the differential treatment experienced by blacks and southern or eastern Europeans: increasing minority presence and fluctuating economic conditions. I show that changes in the black minority's relative population size explained the emergence of disparities in homicide case outcomes involving black victims, while changes in economic conditions accounted for disparate outcomes in homicide cases involving southern or eastern European victims.

The second essay examines the relationship between the gender of the defendant or the victim and judicial outcomes. Comparing outcomes in homicide cases between early Chicago (1870-1930) and a national sample in 1988, this essay shows that the gender gap in trial outcomes has narrowed, but the gender gap in sentence length has not. I find that black women were largely treated similarly to white women in either time period. I also show that the gender gap is the largest in cases where defendants or victims are 20 to 40 years old. The third essay evaluates the determinants of crime by analyzing data over long time horizons and across countries. There is little evidence that either policy variables or less conventional factors, such as abortion, have large effects on crime. On the other hand, this essay presents evidence that drug prohibition enforcement generates violent crime. The results indicate that government policies which affect the nature of dispute resolution play an important role in determining violence.
Notes: "April 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Economics)--Harvard University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references.