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13 J. Experimental Criminology 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/jexpcrm13 and id is 1 raw text is: J Exp Criminol (2017) 13:1-27 crossMark DOI 10.1007/s11292-017-9282-6 The effectiveness of prison for reducing drug offender recidivism: a regression discontinuity analysis Ojmarrh Mitchell' - Joshua C. Cochran2, Daniel P. Mears3 - William D. Bales3 Published online: 8 February 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract Objectives An enduring legacy of the 1980s war on drugs is the increased use of imprisonment for drug offenders. Advocates anticipated, in part, that prison is more effective than community sanctions in reducing recidivism. Despite the contribution of drug offender incarceration to prison growth nationally, and debates about whether this approach should be curtailed, only limited rigorous research exists that evaluates the effect of imprisonment on drug offender recidivism. To address this gap, this paper uses sentencing and recidivism data from a cohort of individuals convicted of felony drug offenses in Florida to examine the effect of imprisonment-as compared to community sanctions-on recidivism. Methods Regression discontinuity analyses are used. These minimize potential selec- tion bias by exogenously assigning cases to conditions based on a rating variable and a cut-off score. Results Results indicate that prison has no effect on drug offenders' rates of reconvic- tion. This finding holds across a range of offender subgroups (racial and ethnic, gender, age, and prior criminal justice system involvement). W Ojmarrh Mitchell omitchell@usfedu Joshua C. Cochran joshua.cochran@uc.edu Daniel P. Mears dmears@fsu.edu Department of Criminology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA 2 University of Cincinnati's School of Criminal Justice, P.O. Box 210389, Dyer Hall, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA 3 Florida State University's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 112 South Copeland Street, Eppes Hall, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1273, USA t_ Springer

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