Topic summary
Repeat offender
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Recidivism.
Law and economics
The law and economics literature has provided various justifications for the fact that the sanction imposed on an offender depends on whether he was convicted previously. In particular, some authors such as Rubinstein (1980) and Polinsky and Rubinfeld (1991) have argued that a record of prior offenses provides information about the offender's characteristics (e.g., a higher-than-average propensity to commit crimes). However, Shavell (2004) has pointed out that making sanctions depend on offense history may be advantageous even when there are no characteristics to be learned about. In particular, Shavell (2004, p. 529) argues that when "detection of a violation implies not only an immediate sanction, but also a higher sanction for a future violation, an individual will be deterred more from committing a violation presently". Müller and Schmitz (2015) show that it may actually be optimal to further increase the deterrence for repeat offenders.