Policy memo «Penal geography, money transfers, prisoner social ties»

This memo suggestes summary of the study which examines the previously unexplored form of social support that inmates enjoy: money transfers. We study the distance decay of financial support of prisoners. Drawing on proprietary data from a Russian prison tech company, we explore the universe of money transfers to any penal facility in Russia in 2017–19. To estimate the distance effect we build a gravity model of remittance flows from 1,117 cities to 931 penal facilities. The features of Russian penal geography reflect on the volume, frequency, and direction of transfers received by inmates. The gravity model of remittances suggests a pronounced distance decay. Correctional facilities closest to the sender city (0...144 km away, 1st percentile of pairwise distance) receive almost 10 times more funds than the facilities located 9,789...13,625 km away from the senders (the 99th percentile). 

Read more in the article preprint «Prisoner social ties, money transfers, and sender-recipient distance: Evidence from Russia (in English)

Text is availiable by the link (in Russian).