FOI Seminar 7 October 2011

Signe Hald Andersen
(Rockwool Research Unit):

 

Serving time or serving the community? Exploiting a policy reform to assess the causal effect of community service

 

Friday 7 October 2011, 12.30-13.30, Building A, first floor (the B.S. Jørgensen seminar room)

Abstract:

There is a wide belief among criminologists, judges and the like, that criminals are better off serving non-custodial sentences instead of going to prison. However empirical evidence of effects is scarce. This paper exploits a policy reform that implements the use of community service as punishment among specific groups of criminals, Danish administrative data and a conditional difference-in-difference model to assess the causal effect of community service on post-serving income, unemployment and crime. The results show that community servers have higher income and lower crime rates compared to offenders who serve custodial sentences. However, community servers have slightly higher unemployment rates.