There is a widespread 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 the effects of community service is scarce. This paper exploits a policy reform that implemented the use of community service as punishment among specific groups of criminals in order to assess the causal effect of community service on post-sentence income, dependency on social benefits, and crime.

This study paper investigates the effect of Denmark's intensified 'active labor market policies, ' which is increasing the threat of program participation on post-unemployment wages. For this purpose, the paper examines a social experiment conducted in two Danish counties where approximately 5,000 unemployed people were randomly selected to receive either a standard treatment or an intensified treatment. It uses a Heckman selection model and finds that an intensified threat of program participation increases the probability of finding a job in the short run, but decreases wages in the same period. (Series: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit - Study Paper - Vol. 49

A number of studies investigate the extent to which levels of welfare benefits reduce crime among the unemployed. This paper expands this literature by testing whether the intensity of other welfare programs aimed at the unemployed affects their criminal activity, using evidence from a Danish social experiment that randomly assigned active labor market programs (ALMPs) of different levels of intensity to newly unemployed individuals.

Many Western countries now use electronic monitoring (EM) of some offenders as an alternative to more traditional forms of punishments such as imprisonment. While the main reason for introducing EM is the growing prison population, politicians and administrators also believe that this type of punishment achieves a positive effect by reducing recidivism and the probability of post-release marginalisation. The small existing empirical literature on the effect of EM finds mixed support for this belief, but is, however, based on very small sample sizes. The authors expand this literature by studying the causal effect of EM on social benefit dependency after the sentence has been served. They use administrative data from Statistics Denmark that include information on all Danish offenders who have served their sentence under EM rather than in prison. They compare post-release dependency rates for this group with outcomes for a historical control group of convicted offenders who would have served their sentences with EM had the option been available (ie: who are identical to the EM group on all observed and unobserved characteristics).