Thanks. Yeah, having a negative tail really reduces expected values. E.g., playing with a toy models, having a 25% that the impact is of the same magnitude but negative ~halves the expected impact:
qualysPerDollarAllPositive = 1/lognormal(9.877,1.649) // taking from systemic change model
qualysPerDollarWithNegativeTail = mx(qualysPerDollarAllPositive, -qualysPerDollarAllPositive, [0.8, 0.25])
[mean(qualysPerDollarAllPositive), mean(qualysPerDollarWithNegativeTail)] // 2e-4 vs 1.13e-4
I wonder if this paper, which appears to show that incarceration reduces prisoner mortality relative to non-incarcerted but criminal-justice-involved people, should change your estimates of CJ reform benefits. Given that, it seems plausible that reducing prison stays actually increases mortality for prisoners.
Another interesting thing about this paper is the implication that the previous work on this topic (which used the general population as the control group) was flawed in an obvious way. That should generally lower our opinion of the academic literature on this topic.
I imagine that the benefits of marginally increased mortality wouldn’t be the most important facto here: the vast majority of prisoners would prefer to be outside prison, even if this leads to an (I presume small) increase in mortality.
So I imagine this would have an effect, but for it to not be too large.
I think it is an impressive effect, though I agree people not wanting to be in prison is more important.
Using a panel of all defendants over the seven years after sentencing, we fnd that incarcerated defendants have a more than 60% lower mortality rate during the time of incarceration than similar defendants who were not incarcerated (an average of 230 deaths per hundred thousand annually as compared to 587 deaths per hundred thousand annually). The main sources of these differences are dramatically lower risks of mortality from homicide, overdose, or suicide during the period of incarceration. Defendants also have a lower risk of mortality from natural causes of death such as heart disease while incarcerated, potentially due to increased access to medical care
Thanks. Yeah, having a negative tail really reduces expected values. E.g., playing with a toy models, having a 25% that the impact is of the same magnitude but negative ~halves the expected impact:
I wonder if this paper, which appears to show that incarceration reduces prisoner mortality relative to non-incarcerted but criminal-justice-involved people, should change your estimates of CJ reform benefits. Given that, it seems plausible that reducing prison stays actually increases mortality for prisoners.
Another interesting thing about this paper is the implication that the previous work on this topic (which used the general population as the control group) was flawed in an obvious way. That should generally lower our opinion of the academic literature on this topic.
I imagine that the benefits of marginally increased mortality wouldn’t be the most important facto here: the vast majority of prisoners would prefer to be outside prison, even if this leads to an (I presume small) increase in mortality.
So I imagine this would have an effect, but for it to not be too large.
I think it is an impressive effect, though I agree people not wanting to be in prison is more important.