%0 Report
        %A Zanella, Giulio
        %T Prison Work and Convict Rehabilitation
        %D 2020
        %8 2020 Jul
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 13446
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp13446
        %X I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data from Italy and combining quasi-experimental and structural econometric methods to achieve both a credible identification and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing channels, I find that work in unskilled prison jobs impacts convicts on longer or shorter terms differently. Increasing work time by 16 hours per month reduces by between 3 and 10 percentage points the reincarceration rate, within three years of release, of convicts on terms longer than six months – because prison work counteracts the rapid depreciation of earning ability experienced by these convicts. For those on shorter terms, the analogous increase leads instead to a re-incarceration rate that is up to 9 percentage points higher, because of a liquidity effect that weakens deterrence.
        %K prison labor
%K prisoner rehabilitation
%K crime
%K recidivism
%K re-incarceration