Demography
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Much of the debate about the costs and benefits of "three-strikes" laws for repeat felony offenders is implicitly demographic, relying on unexamined assumptions about prison population dynamics. However, even state-of-the-art analysis has omitted important demographic details. ⋯ We use the multistate life-table model to investigate patterns of prison population growth and aging under many variants of three-strikes laws. Our analysis allows us to quantify these demographic changes and suggests that the aging of prison populations under three-strikes policies will significantly undermine their long-run effectiveness.