Replication materials for "When Punishment Changes the Rules: Sentencing, Licence Loss, and Measured Recidivism"

Replication materials for Alexeev & Weatherburn (2026), “When Punishment Changes the Rules: Sentencing, Licence Loss, and Measured Recidivism.” The paper studies how a sentence can change the legal rules that govern a person's subsequent conduct, and therefore what counts as measured recidivism. After a proven low-range drink-driving (PCA) offence in New South Wales, a Local Court magistrate chooses among three sentencing packages: (1) unconditional dismissal, (2) conditional nonconviction, and (3) a conviction-recording sentence, which almost always carries licence disqualification. The two nonconviction dispositions are instrumented jointly, using each magistrate's own sentencing propensity for each disposition, computed from cases outside the defendant's own court-time assignment block. A substantial share of the estimated reduction in subsequent proven offending following nonconviction falls in the offence of driving while disqualified or suspended — an offence whose legal possibility is itself created by the conviction-recording package. Recorded recidivism therefore combines behavioural responses with legal exposure created by punishment itself, and the paper argues that policy evaluation should measure the two separately. This deposit contains the analysis code, an independent reconstruction of the empirical pipeline, the presentation/validation code, all non-disclosive aggregate outputs and typeset tables the manuscript reports, the manuscript source and figures, and build/validation logs. It contains no unit-record data. The underlying NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) Reoffending Database extract is confidential administrative data supplied under a restricted-access agreement and cannot be redistributed by the authors. Researchers wishing to replicate or extend the analysis must apply directly to BOCSAR for access to a comparable extract (https://bocsar.nsw.gov.au). One magistrate-level aggregate export is additionally withheld pending explicit data-custodian clearance; see the included Data Availability Statement and README for details. This version (0.99) supersedes the version 1 (0.9) deposit under this same record, which corresponded to an earlier, withdrawn binary-treatment design under a different working title and does not reproduce the current paper. See README.md and Manuscript/revision_log.md in this deposit for the full version history.