Fighting Crime or Needless Time? Disentangling the Reciprocal Effects of Life without Parole and Violent Crime Using Structural Equation Models
Law, Politics and Family in ‘The Americans’
ISBN: 978-1-83753-995-6, eISBN: 978-1-83753-994-9
Publication date: 25 September 2023
Abstract
In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this chapter were presented at the 2019 Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting in Boston and the 2020 Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting in Philadelphia. We would like to thank the audience members at those conferences, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their insights and comments which have aided us immensely in improving this chapter. We also want to thank Ashley Nellis and the Sentencing Project for their willingness to do the hard work of collecting sentencing data from state departments of corrections, for publishing those data, and for graciously sharing data that were not published with us. Without their efforts and generosity, our work would not have been possible. Of course, any remaining lack of clarity and errors are our own. Please direct all correspondence to Ross Kleinstuber, Division of Social Sciences Division, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, 101 Krebs Hall, 450 Schoolhouse Road, Johnstown, PA 15904; email: rkleins@pitt.edu.
Citation
Coldsmith, J. and Kleinstuber, R. (2023), "Fighting Crime or Needless Time? Disentangling the Reciprocal Effects of Life without Parole and Violent Crime Using Structural Equation Models", Sarat, A. (Ed.) Law, Politics and Family in ‘The Americans’ (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 89), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 109-142. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-433720230000089006
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023 Jeremiah Coldsmith and Ross Kleinstuber