Justifying Imprisonment: On the Optimality of Excessively Costly Punishment

Abraham L. Wickelgren, Northwestern University

Abstract

The criminal punishment literature has focused on justifying non-maximal punishments and the use of non-monetary sanctions. It has not addressed why imprisonment, rather than cheaper forms of corporal punishment, should be the dominant type of non-monetary sanctions. David Friedman (1999) recently hypothesized that, because convicts lack political influence, it is desirable to make punishment more costly than necessary to prevent policy makers from excessively punishing convicts. This paper explicitly models this hypothesis and uses simulations to determine under what circumstances this hypothesis justifies using imprisonment rather than cheaper non-monetary sanctions.