Sentencing Policy, Implied Demographic Welfare Weights, and the Theory of Sentencing Reform

Different groups of people experience varying degrees of different externalties. By a government's choice of expenditures to control externalities, it affects different members of the population differently. These choices implicitly "value" the welfare of members of different groups. This paper adapts the framework developed by Ahmad and Stern(1984) to infer welfare weights underlying a system of commodity taxation, to infer the welfare weights implicitly attached to different population groups by U.S. sentencing policy. We also calculate welfare-improving directions of sentencing reform