Crime preventive effects of incapacitation

Among the manifold goals of penal confinement, incapacitation aims to impose a period of “time out” from the criminal career, by removing the opportunity for an individual to commit crime in the community for the duration of his or her sentence. After a period of empirical stagnation, questions concerning the incapacitation effect of imprisonment have recently become salient. This recent empirical attention has been spurred, in part, by the unparalleled growth in the use of incarceration in Western society over the last three decades. This growth is most stark in the United States. Yet in Europe as well, two-thirds of the 35 countries surveyed experienced growth in their incarceration rate during the first half of the 2000s (Aebi et al. 2006). A growing literature has become attentive to the effects of incapacitation. This entry gives an overview of the current literature and pays attention to the (a) effects of general incapacitation and (b) effects of specific incapacitation of frequent offenders