Identifying the Causal Effect of Prison Visitation on Prison Violence

• In Event: Potential Factors for Prison Misconduct

Abstract

Research has generally found that prison visitation is beneficial for a variety of outcomes, including recidivism and prison misconduct. However, existing research has failed to properly identify the causal effect of visits, because they have not dealt properly with the problem of selection bias: prisoners who get visits may be different in key, unmeasured ways from those who do not. Those unmeasured characteristics may be the true cause of the positive outcomes. This paper adopts an instrumental variables approach to identify the causal effect of prison visits, using the distance between the prisoner's home as an instrument to predict their visitation rate. This allows for an unbiased estimate of the effect of prison visitation on violence. This method is tested using data on visits and violence among all prisoners in the Israeli prison system in 2009 and 2010. Results indicate that, whereas regular logistic regression shows that a higher visitation rate is associated with a lower risk of violence, the 2SLS IV regression indicates no significant relationship between visits and violence.

Author

• Josh Guetzkow, The Hebrew University