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A Theory of ‘Too Big To Jail’

  • Iwan Bos EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 22, 2021
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Abstract

Motivated by some recent examples, this paper employs a model of public law enforcement to explain why it may not be in society’s interest to send criminals to prison. We establish two main findings. First, independent of the lawbreaker’s societal position, imprisonment is suboptimal when the harm from the illegal activity is sufficiently small. Second, for a given level of harm, imprisonment is suboptimal when the lawbreaker is sufficiently important. This latter result thus provides a rationale for why some parties are taken to be ‘too big to jail’.

JEL Classification: D63; K42

Corresponding author: Iwan Bos, Department of Organisation, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the comments of and discussions with René Belderbos, Anita van den Berg, Ruud Gerards, Igor van Loo, Marco Marini, Ronald Peeters, Nina Scherl, Carla Schmitt, Dries Vermeulen, and an anonymous reviewer. I am particularly indebted to my parents in law, Nico and Petra van den Berg, for allowing me to stay in their second home, where the lion’s share of this note has been written. All opinions and errors are mine alone.

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Received: 2021-07-26
Revised: 2021-10-15
Accepted: 2021-10-16
Published Online: 2021-12-22

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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