Alexander Volokh

Do Faith-Based Prisons Work?

This Article examines everything we know about the effectiveness of faith-based prisons, which is not very much.Most studies cannot be taken seriously because they are tainted by the “self-selection problem.” It is hard to determine the effect of faith-based prison programs because they are voluntary, and volunteers are more likely to be motivated to change and are therefore already less likely to commit infractions or be re-arrested. This problem is the same one that education researchers have struggled with in determining whether private schools are better than public schools.The only credible studies done so far compare participants with non-participants who volunteered for the program but were rejected. Some studies in this category find no effect, but some do find a modest effect. But even those that find an effect are subject to additional critiques: for instance, participants may have benefited from being exposed to treatment resources that non-participants were denied.Thus, based on current research, there is no strong reason to believe that faith-based prisons work. However, there is also no strong reason to believe that they do not work. I conclude with thoughts on how faith-based prison programs might be improved, and offer a strategy that would allow such experimentation to proceed consistent with the Constitution.

Brief for Antitrust Law Professors as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners - Visa Inc. V. Osborn

The courts of appeals are divided over whether a plaintiff can plausibly plead a horizontal conspiracy among competitors in violation of section 1 of the Sherman Act merely by alleging that members of a business association: (a) have governance rights in the association and (b) agreed to adhere to its rules. Amici submit that the D.C. Circuit erred in holding here that such allegations are sufficient. That holding is inconsistent with this Court’s precedent requiring plaintiffs, in order to allege an illegal agreement, to plead facts plausibly suggesting collusion among the defendants to achieve a common unlawful objective. The approach approved by the decision below would mean that every business that participates in the affairs of a business association can be subjected to expensive discovery concerning an allegedly anticompetitive rule of the association. That would discourage beneficial business-association activities, to the detriment of businesses and consumers alike.

Law: Economics of Its Public Enforcement

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by A.M Polinsky, S. Shavell, volume 12, pp. 8510–8517,

Privatization and the Effectiveness of Monitoring Agencies

The privatization literature depicts the choice whether to contract out as a tradeoff between excessive private investment in quality-reducing cost saving and inadequate public investment in cost-increasing quality improvement, under circumstances where neither the amount of investment nor the cost or quality outcomes are contractible. This paper shows that a monitoring regime, which can verify the benefit of the service at a cost, can bring the investment levels of the private contractor closer to the optimum, while it may not be able to improve the performance of the public sector. Monitors can be captured, and the possibility of capture may decrease social welfare. Social welfare losses due to the possibility of capture may be greater in the case of public provision: The agencies that decide whether to privatize and the agencies that monitor service providers are often identical to, or closely related with, the agencies that actually provide the service if it is kept in-house. Therefore, privatization decisionmakers and monitoring agencies may be more prone to capture when the service is public. Therefore, efficiency may counsel in favor of a purchaser-provider split and a monitor-provider split.