David Macdonald (University of British Columbia Okanagan) has published "Truth in Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism" on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Truth in Sentencing laws eliminate discretion in prison release. This decreases the incentive for rehabilitative effort among prisoners. I use a regression discontinuity design to exploit a change in these incentives created by the introduction of TIS in Arizona. Before prison, I find that sentences were reduced by 20% for TIS offenders. Further, I find that rule infractions increased by 22% to 55% and education enrolment fell by 24%. After release, I find offenders were 4.8 p.p. more likely to reoffend. I further find that recidivism and infractions effects are largest among drug and violent offenders. Finally, I show that the reduction in sentences resulted in a broad equalization of time served at the cutoff, which indicates that the removal of early-release incentives by TIS was the main mechanism driving results.
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