The Social Provision of Punishment and Incarceration
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2807267 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel J D''Amico, Daniel J D'Amico, Daniel J D’Amico (John Brown University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1107-1132 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Economics and Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9246 • E-ISSN: 1536-7150 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/ajes.12197 |
| OpenAlex | W2765840692 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 64 |
Standard economic theory proposes that public goods (equally available to everyone) will be underprovided by private markets. Individuals can benefit without having to pay, so there is little incentive to invest or manage resources efficiently. The punishment of criminals is an example of this, since everyone in a society benefits from reduced crime whether they pay to apprehend criminals or not. On that basis, it is widely presumed that governments must provide criminal justice services, including prisons. But the evidence in favor of that view is ambiguous. Stateless societies throughout history have found ways to maintain public order without ever building a prison. Nations with adequate social safety nets and a high degree of equality are also likely to rely on alternatives to incarceration. Strong forms of public goods theory, when applied to punishments and prisons, are shown to be false, since crime control does exist without a centralized state. Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that centralized government provision and management can also suffer inefficiencies from overproduction. Only comparative institutional analysis can speak to the efficiency potentials of punishment, wherein the costs of underproduction are assessed against the likely consequences of overproduction
Business · Criminology · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Incentive · Law and economics · Microeconomics · Order (exchange) · Prison · Public economics · Public good · Punishment (psychology) · Sociology · Corruption and Economic Development · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Finance · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
Lectures on jurisprudence
The Problem of Punishment
The Invisible Hook
Introduction
Order without Law
The Not So Wild, Wild West
The Prisoners' Dilemma
The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law
A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Law
Opting out of the Legal System
The Lighthouse in Economics
The discovery of the asylum
The Law of Primitive Man
Governing the Commons
The foreign policy decision-maker simulation
Democracy and Knowledge
Varieties of Capitalism
The Medieval Prison
Mafias on the Move
Anarchy Unbound
The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
Penal Systems
The Ethics of Liberty
Law Enforcement, Malfeasance, and Compensation of Enforcers
The Social Order of the Underworld
A Time-Series Analysis of Crime, Deterrence, and Drug Abuse in New York City
Off the Books
The Logic of Collective Action
Understanding Institutional Diversity
The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure
Criminal constitutions
Law and revolution. The formation of the Western legal tradition
The prison in economics
A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures
An‐ arrgh ‐chy
Crime and Punishment
The Prison Experience
From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
The Sicilian Mafia
Private Creation and Enforcement of Law
A Theory of the Ethnically Homogeneous Middleman Group
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s
Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |