Correspondence: Jurisdictional Competition in Criminal Justice: How Much Does It Really Happen?

It’s a familiar image from American fiction: the bad guy ridden out of town on a rail or beaten up by the sheriff and dumped on the next train out. Where do they go? Banishment is an age-old form of punishment. In America, where an atomized criminal justice system has survived into the twenty-first century, we can continue to try to dump our criminals on our near neighbors, and—as Doron Teichman points out in his interesting article—that is not the only way that American states, counties, and cities can try to reduce their own crime rates by exporting crime elsewhere. They can also adopt policies that encourage criminals to commit their crimes over the border or to move away entirely.