TIME IN AND TIME OUT

Maybe it's time to get soft on crime.

That's because many criminals are more likely to go astray once they
get out of prison if they faced longer sentences and more punitive
conditions in the slammer, claim economists M. Keith Chen of Yale
University and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago.

"Harsher prison conditions are associated with significantly more
post-release crime," they report in their updated working paper
posted on the university Web sites, a finding that suggests doing
hard time often may only produce more hard-core crooks.

For their study, Shapiro and Chen looked at convicts with virtually
identical criminal histories and examined the "security risk" score
each federal prisoner is given before entering prison. The rating,
which ranges from zero to 36, is based on the prisoner's rap sheet,
predisposition to violence and other factors. (The score determines
whether an inmate is assigned to a "minimum-," "low-," "medium-" or
"maximum-" security prison.)

The researchers focused on inmates who had ratings within a few
points of each other but were assigned to different security levels
because they were just under or over a cutoff. Chen and Shapiro
reasoned that roughly similar criminals should have roughly equal
probabilities of committing crimes once they were released.

Scratch that theory: Offenders who scored barely under the cutoff
point and served time in a minimum-security environment were only
half as likely to commit crimes in the three years after release as
those unfortunates who scored just high enough to be sentenced to the
next-higher security class. The same general pattern appeared to hold
true at other cutoffs.

So why were those crooks who did harder time twice as likely to get
into trouble again? Shapiro and Chen suspect that those who fall into
the higher security class are housed with more hard-core, violent
criminals who may school them in the dark arts or otherwise encourage
them to resume their lives of crime.