IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17070.html

Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions: Evidence from the Rise of the Evangelical Church in Chile

Author

Listed:
  • Barrios Fernandez, Andres
  • Garcia-Hombrados, Jorge

Abstract

Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison in the two years following their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging desistance from crime has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates. This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to provide causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood to which inmates return after prison matter. Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders by 11 percentage points. This effect represents a drop of 18% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We discuss three classes of mechanisms---social support, promotion of Evangelical values, and social monitoring---and provide evidence consistent with the first of them. Our results suggest that interventions that give recently released inmates access to local support networks could play an important role in encouraging crime desistance.

Suggested Citation

  • Barrios Fernandez, Andres & Garcia-Hombrados, Jorge, 2022. "Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions: Evidence from the Rise of the Evangelical Church in Chile," CEPR Discussion Papers 17070, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17070
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17070
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods
    • J4 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17070. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.