Public Choice
Perspectives on Crime
and Punishment
Daniel J. D’Amico
Mises Academy: The American Prison State, Lecture 4
What is, is efficient…
“Many blacks have their lives
disrupted by the criminal
justice system, but the lives
and property of many blacks
are also protected by that
same system. Looking at
only the cost of
imprisonment seems a very
strange way to answer the
question of whether we
should change the current
system (2009).”
Are prisons public goods or public
bads?
Commons Problems
“[A] senior level of
government may in part shift
the costs of providing prison
services from one sentencing
jurisdiction onto another via
prison financing. Thus the
cost of delivery does not fully
constrain the local demand
for confinement. The
tendency to prison
overcrowding in the federal
part of the system and to
underbuilding in the local
part follows directly (Avio,
2003 p. 16).”
Rent Seeking and
Capture
Rent Seeking - spending real
resources to secure political profits
rather than producing real value.
Capture: Siphoning monopoly profits
for private interests.
Politics as
Exchange
Fiscal spending creates new
populations who collectively
act to perpetuate spending.
Long run trends toward deficit
and debasement.
Irrational and Expressive Voting
Rules, Discretion and
Constitutional Constraint