Seminar «Prison Work and Convict Rehabilitation»

IZA-HSE University International Labor Seminar was held on February 9, 2021.

Speaker: Giulio Zanella (University of Bologna and IZA).

Title: Prison Work and Convict Rehabilitation.

I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data from Italy and combining quasi-experimental and structural econometric methods to achieve both a credible identification and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing channels and nonlinearities, I find that additional work impacts convicts at different points of the term distribution differently: it reduces the re-incarceration rate in the middle of the distribution, where prison work counteracts a rapid depreciation of earning ability, while for convicts on shorter or longer terms a liquidity effect that softens deterrence prevails.

Working paper (PDF, 1.72 Мб) 

Discussant: Aleksey Oshchepkov (CLMS HSE).