Measuring the Effect of the Experience of Incarceration on Reoffending

Financial pressures and court orders are forcing Federal and state governments to re-think policies affecting who is sent to prison and for how long. Knowledge of how the experience of imprisonment affects reoffending is vital to making good policy choices, yet high quality evidence is scarce. We improve on existing evidence by using innovative matching methods based on integer programming for precisely adjusting for observed covariates and augmenting the strength of the instrumental variable.