Turning Prisoners Into Slaves Doesn't Deter Crime

In recent years, people have started to notice that the economics discipline is turning away from pure theory and toward a more empirical approach. But this isn’t just an academic curiosity. It has real, positive consequences for people’s lives. Economic theory, if unchecked by data, can easily lead to very bad policy decisions.

For a good example, consider a recent paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Stanford University law professor A. Mitchell Polinsky. The author isn’t primarily an academic economist -- he has a courtesy appointment at Stanford’s econ department -- but the legal profession now has many people working at the intersection of the two disciplines, with Judge Richard Posner being the most famous example. Polinsky’s paper, entitled “Prison work programs in a model of deterrence,” says that making prisoners work without pay can help deter crime, by making prison more unpleasant.