Does the Time Cause the Crime?: An Examination of the Relationship Between Time Served and Reoffending in the Netherlands

• NCJ Number: 237620
• Journal: Criminology Volume: 49 Issue: 4 Dated: November 2011 Pages: 1149-1194
• Author(s): G. Matthew Snodgrass; Arjan A.J. Blokland; Amelia Haviland; Paul Nieuwbeerta; Daniel S. Nagin
• Date Published: November 2011
• Length: 46 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study investigated the relationship between time served in prison and an offender's risk of future criminality.

Abstract

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. (Published Abstract)