Keay, Inwood, and Long on Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913 @kris_inwood

Ian Keay, Queen's University, Department of Economics, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, Department of Economics, and Blair Long, Cape Breton University have published Institutional Change and Criminal Sentencing on the Frontier: Evidence from British Columbia's Jails, 1864-1913. Here is the abstract.

In this paper we document the effect of transformative institutional change on criminal sentencing in a frontier environment. New historical evidence digitized from British Columbia’s (BC) prison admission ledgers allows us to track changes in sentencing distributions from 1864 to 1913. We find that as BC's criminal justice system moved from informal and locally independent colonial institutions, toward a set of institutions that closely resemble the system in place today, average sentences got longer and sentence dispersion fell. We isolate the increase in sentence length and decrease in sentence dispersion that can be attributed to changes in judicial decision-making by controlling for changes in the observable characteristics of the province's prison population. We also show that changes in the sentencing distribution were coincident with a reduction in judicial discretion, an increase in sentence predictability, and an expansion in the criminal justice system along the extensive margin.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.