Sentencing policy, implied demographic welfare weights, and the theory of sentencing reform

Different groups of people experience varying degrees of different externalities. 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 (Journal of Public Economics, 1984, 25, 259-298) to infer welfare weights underlying a system of commodity taxation, to infer the welfare weights implicitly attached to different population groups by US sentencing policy. Welfare-improving directions of sentencing reform are also calculated.