Full Citation

Title: The Digital Scarlet Letter: The Effect of Online Criminal Records on Crime

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2011

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: How does public access to criminal records affect crime? Economic theory suggests that expanding access to criminal information may increase the cost of crime to potential criminals by endangering their future work prospects and thus act as a deterrent. However, increased provision ofinformation could also obstruct ex-convicts from finding legal employment and lead to higher recidivism rates. I exploit the state and time variation in the introduction of state-maintained online criminal databases which represent a sharp drop in the cost and effort of gaining criminal background information on another person to empirically investigate the theoretical tradeoff between deterrence and recidivism. I find that online criminalrecords lead to a small net reduction in property crime rates, concentrated among burglary and larceny, but violent crime rates are not significantly affected. At the same time, I observe a marked increase of approximately 3.6 percentage points in the probability of recidivism among ex-offenders.

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Lee, Dara

Publisher: Boston University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Crime and Deviance

Countries: