The hedonic consequences of punishment revisited.

• Author: Wildeman, Christopher

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THE HEDONIC CONSEQUENCES OF INCARCERATION A. The Causes of Happiness B. The Direct and Indirect Consequences of Incarceration. 1. The Direct Consequences of Incarceration 2. The Indirect Consequences of Incarceration C. Three Hypotheses II. DATA, MEASURES, AND ANALYTIC STRATEGY A. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study B. Measures C. Analytic Strategy III. RESULTS A. Descriptive Differences in Happiness B. Does Incarceration Cause Unhappiness? C. Why Does Incarceration Cause Unhappiness? CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

The degree to which imprisonment exacts a toll on individuals' well-being is both an empirical question and an important concern for the legal profession. It is an empirical question because it can be addressed causally by measuring the well-being of individuals before, during, and after imprisonment, thereby assessing how their well-being changes as a function of prison or jail sentences. It is an important concern for the legal profession because it relates to the proportional severity of sentencing. Empirical estimates of the hedonic consequences of incarceration would provide justification for asserting that a punishment fits the crime (1) and would be especially informative if they simultaneously addressed the effects of current incarceration and prior incarceration on prisoners' happiness. By distinguishing the two, moreover, it is possible to assess where the effects of incarceration on happiness emerge: from the direct consequences of imprisonment, what Gresham Sykes called "the pains of imprisonment" in his classic work The Society of Captives, (2) or from the indirect social consequences of previous incarceration. (3)

Given the clear importance of this topic for aligning the severity of punishments with the severity of crimes, this topic has generated much debate, (4) especially since the publication of John Bronsteen and his colleagues' article, Happiness and Punishment, in the University of Chicago Law Review. (5) They detail the complications of the hedonic adaptation literature and the importance of understanding this literature as it applies to incarceration. Mostly using examples regarding other life events, they argue for the complicating influence of adaptation, noting above all that adaptation might deprive incarceration of its proportionality, diminishing its putative negative effects while in prison but doing little to offset its negative effects after release. (6) This possibility is inconsistent with the intuitions ordinarily used in the law, (7) but as there is little empirical research directly on the topic, it is unclear whether adaptation actually applies to incarceration and, if so, how.

At present, empirical research on the hedonic consequences of punishment addresses the relationship in a piecemeal and cross-sectional fashion. For example, research explores happiness upon prison entry and throughout the incarceration period, (8) as well as mental health among former inmates, (9) but no research considers the same people at different times in the process, an oversight that makes it impossible to gauge the full hedonic costs of incarceration. Additionally, previous research does little to test whether the direct or indirect consequences of current and recent incarceration drive declines in happiness. Thus, we lack empirical evidence regarding whether the hedonic consequences of incarceration are causal, if they persist after prison release, and what mechanisms explain such effects. Despite strong reasons to believe incarceration diminishes happiness, we do not know if it actually does.

The lack of empirical research is surprising because social scientists, from Alexis de Tocqueville (10) to Gresham Sykes (11) to Donald Clemmer (12) to Erving Goffman (13) to Michel Foucault, (14) have long been fascinated by the consequences of confinement for the subjective well-being of individuals. Indeed, social scientists were concerned about the pains of imprisonment (15) before they were concerned about most other consequences of incarceration. In recent years, however, the literature has focused less on the pains of imprisonment and more on other consequences of incarceration, such as labor market prospects, (16) family life, (17) and health. (18) It is time to empirically extend this literature to subjective well-being with Bronsteen and colleagues as a guide.

In this Article, we use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which is a longitudinal study of urban families with a child born between 1998 and 2000, to explore whether and how current incarceration and recent incarceration (incarceration in the past two years) affect happiness. A focus on the dynamics of incarceration allows us to assess how long the hedonic consequences of incarceration persist. The data also permit an exploration of the collateral consequences of incarceration, thereby allowing us to address why incarceration decreases happiness. Following this Introduction, our study is divided into four parts. In Part I, we use prior research on the causes of happiness, as well as on the direct and indirect effects of incarceration, to propose three hypotheses, which we refer to as (1) the pains of imprisonment hypothesis, (2) the incomplete adaptation hypothesis, and (3) the selection hypothesis. In so doing, we also demonstrate that, despite extensive speculation, the average effects of current and recent incarceration remain unknown. In Part II, we describe our data source and the analytic strategies used to examine relationships between current incarceration, recent incarceration, and happiness. In Part III, we present and summarize our results. In Part IV, we discuss limitations of our analysis, suggestions for related future research, and the implications of our results for the law.

1. THE HEDONIC CONSEQUENCES OF INCARCERATION

   To develop hypotheses concerning the hedonic consequences of incarceration, we start by reviewing research on factors linked to happiness with an emphasis on how adaptation and stable individual traits drive the happiness of individuals to rapidly stabilize to their previous levels, even after experiencing extreme shifts in life circumstances. We then review the literature on the effects of incarceration in two parts. First, we discuss the pains of imprisonment, which we refer to as the direct drivers of incarceration's hedonic consequences. Second, we consider the effects of incarceration on economic well-being, family life, and health, paying attention to the differential effects of current and recent incarceration on these outcomes. We refer to these as the indirect drivers of incarceration's hedonic consequences.

   Next, we link the literature on the causes of happiness and the literature on the consequences of incarceration to derive three hypotheses. The first, the pains of imprisonment hypothesis, suggests that current incarceration has large, negative effects and that recent incarceration has no hedonic consequences because most of the effects of incarceration are driven by the direct effects of incarceration. (19) The second hypothesis, the incomplete adaptation hypothesis, proposes that incarceration has both immediate and enduring negative effects on happiness, resulting from both direct and indirect effects. (20) The final hypothesis, the

   selection hypothesis, suggests that neither current incarceration nor recent incarceration has hedonic consequences. According to this perspective, currently or recently incarcerated men are not unhappy because of their incarceration, but because the forces that led them to prison (such as antisocial personalities) are themselves associated with unhappiness, rendering adaptation largely irrelevant to understanding the relationship between incarceration and happiness.

   1. THE CAUSES OF HAPPINESS

      Research on happiness has burgeoned throughout the last decade, but an especially important insight relates to the stability of a person's happiness in dynamic environments. Adaptation refers to the tendency of even severe life events to have only temporary effects on well-being. Happiness tends to rebound to prior levels after both positive and negative life events. In a particularly famous example, Philip Brickman and colleagues demonstrated that neither lottery winners nor quadriplegics show long-lasting changes in their well-being. (21) Consistent with this, other research also showed that baseline happiness is not affectively neutral and that both groups are moderately happy years later. (22) There are a variety of explanations for this persistence, but evidence suggests that personality traits push happiness to long-run levels and, further, that individuals have more resilience than they recognize, leading them to therefore overestimate the negative consequences of events. There are some situations, however, that lead to lasting declines in well-being. Some events, including, for example, unemployment, are difficult to adapt to and cause chronic problems that keep happiness suppressed. Similarly, widowhood leads to lasting declines in happiness, suggesting that whatever adaptation occurs happens slowly. (23)

      With respect to incarceration, the adaptation literature presents a paradox. On one hand, if individuals adapt to incarceration in a similar manner as they adapt to many other life events, the putative negative effects of incarceration may be overstated. Furthermore, the effects of incarceration may be insensitive to sentence length insofar as individuals eventually adapt to imprisonment, regardless of the length. On the other hand, the adaptation literature heightens the relevance of post-release experiences for happiness, which are generally neglected in sentencing decisions and in the literature on the psychological consequences of incarceration. But insofar as incarceration leads to persistent difficulties with reintegration, including social isolation and diminished...