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The paper develops a variant of the economic model of crime. The model developed is estimated using information on the post-release activities of a sample of men released from the North Carolina prison system. Both the expected certainty and severity of punishment are found to deter criminal activity in a number of instances and a 1 percent increase in certainty is generally found to have a greater effect than a similar increase in severity. Certainty of punishment is found to have a greater effect for relatively minor offenders and severity for persons offenders. While higher legal wages are found to deter, their effect is quite weak.
Ann Dryden Witte (Fri,) studied this question.