DOES THE TIME CAUSE THE CRIME? AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TIME SERVED AND REOFFENDING IN THE NETHERLANDS

This work uses a sample of Dutch offenders, serving an average of 6.7 months of confinement, to examine the relationship between time served in prison and future criminality. To overcome the selection issues inherent in this examination, this article introduces a new method to the criminological lit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Criminology (Beverly Hills) 2011-11, Vol.49 (4), p.1149-1194
Main Authors: SNODGRASS, G. MATTHEW, BLOKLAND, ARJAN A. J., HAVILAND, AMELIA, NIEUWBEERTA, PAUL, NAGIN, DANIEL S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
corrections
Correlation analysis
Crime
Crime Rates
Criminality
Criminology
Habitual offenders
Imprisonment
incarceration
matching with doses
Netherlands
Offenders
optimal nonbipartite matching
Prisoner rehabilitation
Prisons
Recidivism
time served
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Summary:This work uses a sample of Dutch offenders, serving an average of 6.7 months of confinement, to examine the relationship between time served in prison and future criminality. To overcome the selection issues inherent in this examination, this article introduces a new method to the criminological literature that relies on a generalization of the propensity score to control for observed differences in offenders sentenced to different periods of confinement. On the whole, very little evidence of a relationship between time served and future offending was found. In particular, 3‐year reconviction rate and the proportion of offenders reconvicted in the next 3 years do not seem to depend on incarceration length. Although a relationship between time served and future sentence length was found, the evidence is modest.
ISSN:0011-1384
1745-9125
DOI:10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00254.x