Abstract
Objectives
Investigate the transition from prison to employment and the relationship between post-release employment and recidivism.
Methods
We use a sample of every person released from Norwegian prisons in 2003 (N = 7,476), and they are followed through 2006 with monthly measures. We estimate the time to recidivism using discrete time survival models, conditioning upon both pre-release characteristics and post-release time-varying covariates (employment, educational enrollment and participation in labor market programs).
Results
The majority of former inmates were employed at some point in our data window, but it took approximately 30 months for 30% of them to become employed. The hazard of recidivism is substantially lower (0.12, p < .001) when former inmates are employed compared with unemployed, although observable individual characteristics can account for a large share of this association (0.50, p < .001, after adjustment). The negative association between employment and recidivism remains when controlling for other post-release statuses. Although post-release employment periods are associated with a lower risk of recidivism for all categories of principal offence, the magnitude of the association varies. The association is smaller for those receiving social benefits.
Conclusion
The findings are consistent with theories suggesting that employment reduces the risk of recidivism.
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Notes
Importantly, such programs might have an effect regardless of whether they improve employability.
Alternative ways of dealing with such censoring is to (1) only include months without imprisonment in the analysis, or (2) include the exposure time as a covariate in the model. We have tested each of these approaches, and the results are virtually identical across models.
Some individuals have no income because they are imprisoned, but note that we include a measure of the time spent in prison during the year. Thus, we control for imprisonment in the regression analysis.
The reincarceration rate is far lower than our main measure of recidivism (the date a new offence is committed). Ignoring censoring at recidivism would have yielded approximately 24% of the sample reincarcerated (not reported in tables) by the end of 2006.
The first major wave of immigration to Norway began in the 1970s. For this reason, the second generation of immigrants (two immigrant parents) is very young, predominantly below the age of 30 (Statistics Norway, 2010).
The results might be affected by how the function of time is specified, so we compared models with linear, quadratic and cubic polynomials of time as well as a model with separate dummies for each month. The quadratic model gave the best relative fit, and the estimate for post-release employment did not change notably across these models. Thus, we apply models with a quadratic function of time throughout.
The estimates from the background characteristics are all as expected based on the general notion that more resources and social integration are associated with decreasing recidivism. For example, educational level, parents’ educational level, and income are negatively associated with recidivism. Because these variables are not of primary interest for this analysis (we only want to control for these characteristics), we do not discuss them further.
One might argue that a job could be associated with less recidivism only if one’s earnings are enough to cover basic needs; otherwise, social assistance is still needed. We included an interaction term to check this assumption. For those receiving social benefits, post-release employment gives an odds ratio of recidivism of exp(−.722 + .311) = 0.66, whereas post-release employment gives an odds ratio of exp(−.722) = 0.48 for those not receiving social assistance.
According to OECD statistics (URL: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/crimedata.html), the rates for e.g. murder, assault and burglary are low, while the rate for theft is high. It should be acknowledged that comparisons of crime rates across countries are highly problematic, so this is at best a rough indication.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to seminar participants for helpful comments and discussions and to Erling Holmøy, Willy Pedersen, Steven Messner and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. We gratefully appreciate financial support from the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police, the Norwegian Research Council, and Statistics Norway for this project.
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Skardhamar, T., Telle, K. Post-release Employment and Recidivism in Norway. J Quant Criminol 28, 629–649 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9166-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9166-x