Citation

Wickelgren AL. Am. Law Econ. Rev. 2003; 5(2): 377-411.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/aler/ahg018

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The criminal punishment literature has focused on justifying nonmaximal punishments and the use of nonmonetary sanctions. It has not addressed why imprisonment, rather than cheaper forms of corporal punishment, should be the dominant type of nonmonetary sanctions. David Friedman (1999) recently hypothesized that, because convicts lack political influence, it is desirable to make punishment costlier than necessary to prevent policy makers from excessively punishing convicts. This article explicitly models this hypothesis and uses simulations to determine under what circumstances this hypothesis justifies using imprisonment rather than cheaper nonmonetary sanctions.