Does Social Service Spending Reduce Incarceration?

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1: Punishment and Criminal Justice Reform

Abstract

Social services can reduce crime by addressing its root causes, and they can reduce incarceration by providing governments with a response to social problems besides the criminal justice system. Does increased social spending reduce incarceration? This study addresses this question with data on 815 U.S. counties from 1990 to 2017. It develops a quasi-experimental design with state and federal grants acting as an instrument for county social spending. Two-way fixed effects models in the instrumental variable framework estimate that a 10% increase in social service spending reduces incarceration by 0.9% in each of the next three years. Effects persist for six years. Disaggregating social spending reveals that education and public assistance expenditures have the largest suppressive effect on incarceration rates, with education’s effects taking longer and public assistance’s effects dissipating faster. Spending on healthcare and housing also reduced incarceration, but with weaker, more temporary impacts. Our results provide support for theories of welfare–carceral tradeoffs and suggest that recent reductions to social services are likely to increase incarceration rates in the long term.

Authors

• Brenden Beck, Rutgers University-Newark

• Morgan McMains-Nurisio, Rutgers University-Newark