From classrooms to crime prevention: The incapacitation effect of extending the school day in Mexico

Does lengthening the school day incapacitate youth from criminal and deviant behavior? We address this question by leveraging exogenous variation in time spent in school generated by the introduction of the Full-Time Schools Program (FTS) in Mexico. FTS extended the school day from 4.5 to 8 hours and was implemented through a staggered rollout across municipalities. Using municipal-level crime data from the school years 2010/11 to 2016/17, we exploit variation in program adoption timing to estimate the causal effects of an extended school day on crime. Results from a dynamic event-study model show that FTS reduces common robbery by 11% relative to the base-year level, with no significant effects on other minor crimes or serious felonies. The effects are concentrated in middle schools (ages 12–14) and in municipalities with lower socioeconomic status, a critical age range associated with the onset of delinquent behavior and the formation of criminal trajectories. Our findings are robust to treatment-effect heterogeneity under staggered implementation and to potential contamination from the parallel Secure Schools program. We further corroborate these results using judicially reviewed juvenile crime data for adolescents aged 12–17. In addition, we show that middle-school dropout rates declined, while enrollment and teacher–student ratios were unaffected, suggesting no evidence of overcrowding. Overall, our results provide strong evidence of an incapacitation effect and highlight education policies as an effective crime-prevention strategy during early adolescence.