Anne Morrison Piehl                                               

    Associate Professor
    Department of Economics & Program in Criminal Justice
    Rutgers University
    75 Hamilton Street
    New Brunswick, NJ 08901
    (732) 932-7363
    apiehl at economics dot rutgers dot edu                                                                                                                                

Curriculum vita:

•  Click here for a copy of my CV.

Links to some of my recent papers:

• Preparing Prisoners for Employment: The Power of Small Rewards (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Civic Report no. 57, May 2009) This report describes a prisoner reentry program in Montgomery County, Maryland.  At release, nearly 90% are employed.  The paper argues that the behavioral techniques employed by this Pre-release Center can be adapted by other reentry programs or parole agencies to improve inmate accountability and attach inmates to the legitimate labor market.
• Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration, Cambridge University Press, 2008. 

• Why are Immigrants' Incarceration Rates So Low? Evidence on Selective Immigration, Deterrence, and Deportation (with Kristin Butcher).  We document that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than the native born in the United States and that the differential has increased over time. We present evidence that these low rates are not the mechanical result of deportation policies toward criminal aliens.  Based on empirical patterns in the data, we argue that the process of immigration selects those less likely to become incarcerated. 
• Immigration and Crime in Early 20th Century America (with Carolyn Moehling).  We find that a century ago immigrants may have been slightly more likely than natives to be involved in crime.  Aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data meant that analysts at the time missed important features of the immigrant-native incarceration comparison, especially because the closing of the borders in the 1920s meant that immigrants were increasingly older than natives and, consequently, less prone to crime.  Our analyses control carefully for age, and show that prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity in 1904, but by 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older.  
• Measuring and Explaining Charge Bargaining (with Shawn Bushway), Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23(2), June 2007, 105-125. Charge bargaining is a form of discretion in criminal sentencing that is obscured in many studies of sentencing outcomes. We measure the extent of the bargain by the magnitude of the reduction in sentence length. Using this measure, charge bargaining plays an empirically important role in determining sentencing outcomes and provides a very different estimate of the discretion than is given by the rate of bargaining, which is the usual measure used. 
• The Inextricable Link between Age and Criminal History in Sentencing (with Shawn Bushway), Crime & Delinquency, 53(1), January 2007, 156-183. In sentencing research, significant negative coefficients on age have been interpreted as evidence that the criminal justice system discriminates against younger people. But criminal sentencing laws generally specify punishment in terms of the number of past events in a defendant’s criminal history.  As a reult, age is meaningful because older people have had more time to accumulate criminal history events. Therefore, two people of different ages with the same criminal history are not in fact equal. This is true for pure retributivists (as the fact that the younger offender has been committing crimes at a higher rate of offending may make the younger offender more culpable) and is also true for those with utilitarian aims for sentencing (as recidivism will be higher for younger offenders). Simulations of alternative sentencing schemes illustrate the stakes for how sentencing is framed:  the interests of low-rate older offenders are opposed to those of high-rate younger offenders.

Last revision of this page: 7/10/2009