Giovanni Mastrobuoni (CCA and UniTO)

Women Behind Bars: Do Gender-Specific Prisons Reduce Recidivism?

Abstract: In 143 countries, incarcerated women serve their sentence in a separate section within prisons that mainly house male inmates, i.e., mixed-gender prisons. In fewer cases, there are prisons exclusively for women, that is, women-only prisons. We investigate whether serving time in a women-only prison, rather than a mixed- gender one, causes a reduction in women’s recidivism. We use data from Italy, where both types of prison coexist and where the institutional details of the process allocating women convict to prisons allow us to mimic a quasi-random assignment. Using confidential data on the universe of individual inmates serving time between 2012 and 2022, we find that women-only prisons lower women’s recidivism by up to 15 percentage points in the three years after their release. We conjecture, with some supporting evidence, that one mechanism behind this result is that detention structures that accommodate only women can be more easily customized around their needs and allow for more effective rehabilitation initiatives.