The Negative Externalities of the Juvenile Justice System

This summer I read Just Mercy, a memoir of a lawyer who represents the poor, wrongly condemned, and women and children, especially those on death row. It shares many anecdotes of various cases he has come across, including one of a young child who was tried as an adult for capital murder due to unfortunate circumstances. In prison, the boy faced many difficulties, including abuse and trauma. This is not an uncommon story; in fact, many people who are incarcerated for smaller crimes leave victim, or even under the influence of, other criminals. This is depicted in the biographical crime film Blow, in which the American cocaine smuggler George Jung says, “Danbury wasn’t a prison. It was a crime school. I went in with a bachelor of marijuana and came out with a doctorate of cocaine.”

Incarceration has many unintended consequences; yet, as it reads in Just Mercy, “[b]etween 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days...business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem.” Many may agree that there is an overconsumption of incarceration, and this may be explained by the economic principle of externalities. Although a bit more complex than the traditional textbook examples, we can argue that there is a negative consumption externality when the justice system "consumes" jail time by sentencing criminals while taking into account only private, and not social, marginal benefit. When juries and judges deem criminals worthy of jail time or even death row, they do not have to take into account the great costs born by the individual criminal such as trauma and by society as a whole by creating worse criminals, as described in the above examples.

One example of a potential public-sector remedy that can be applied from class is quantity regulation. The government could perhaps cap the number of prison beds that local prosecutors can use each year in each state, with a fee for further imprisonments. Similar to the pollution rights we talked about in class, states could sell their beds to others. Although this would not be a perfect solution by any means, the justice system would be forced to consider other punishments and be more selective with its imprisonments.