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Preventing crime through selective incapacitation

Vollaard,B.A.
Abstract
Making the length of a prison sentence conditional upon an individual’s offence history is shown to be a powerful way of preventing crime. Under a law adopted in the Netherlands in 2001, prolific offenders could be sentenced to a prison term that was approximately 10 times longer than usual. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in application of the law across 31 cities to identify the effect on crime. We find the sentence enhancements to have reduced the rate of theft by 25%. The size of the crime-reducing effect is found to be subject to diminishing returns.
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2013-03
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Vollaard, B A 2013, 'Preventing crime through selective incapacitation', Economic Journal, vol. 123, no. 567, pp. 262-284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02522.x
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/59373
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