Measuring Punitivity in Sentencing

• In Event: Punitiveness in Policy and in Practice

Abstract

Tough-on-crime policies have gained prevalence in recent years in Hungarian criminal law as the government introduced the new Penal Code that involves many modifications that result in expanded sentence lengths a more people in prisons (e.g. three-strikes). As a consequence, prison population has quickly grown from around 14,000 in 2008 to 18,000 by 2013, resulting in more than 140% prison overcrowding, all while the number of perpetrators dropped from 113,000 in 2008 to 96,000 in 2013. Our research project intends to explore the consequences of this shift in crime policy on the costs of crime and crime prevention. Using a dataset based on nonpublic in-depth sentencing data from the judiciary, we develop econometric models first to measure the impact of these policy changes on actual sentencing practice and then to measure how the shift in sentencing practice translates into presumably longer actual prison spells. We are then feeding our results into a microsimulation model with which we could forecast the impact of the policy changes on prison populations and the resulting increased prison costs for the next few decades.

Author

• Csaba Györy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Legal Research