Effects of Juvenile Incarceration: Evidence from Randomly-Assigned Judges

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult recidivism. Using nearly 100,000 juvenile offenders over a ten-year period from an urban county in the U.S., the estimates suggest large increases in the likelihood of adult incarceration for those who were incarcerated as a juvenile. Marginal treatment effect estimates show that these results are found across a relatively wide range of judges, which adds confidence that our estimates are uncontaminated by selection into juvenile detention. This paper is preliminary. Comments welcome.