Crime, Imprisonment, and Female Labor Force Participation: A Time-Series Approach

Crime, Imprisonment, and Female Labor Force Participation: A Time-Series Approach Robert Witt and Ann Dryden Witte NBER Working Paper No. 6786 November 1998 JEL No. K14, H0 Rapidly growing prison population in the US has led to an upsurge of interest in discerning the impact of this costly increase on crime rates. Estimates of impact vary. We obtain new estimates of the impact of prisons using different data, specification and estimation technique than previous work. We find that both higher levels of imprisonment and increases in labor force participation of women are related to significantly higher crime rate. The impact of female labor force participation is much larger than the impact of imprisonment.