Written by: Rasmus Landersø

This paper examines how the length of a period of incarceration in prison affects offenders’ rate of unemployment, dependency on transfer payments and earnings after release. Offenders who serve prison sentences of different lengths are rarely directly comparable with each other. Differences in the labour market situations after release among people who serve sentences of different lengths may thus reflect differences among the individuals and not the effects of the lengths of their sentences. In order to avoid this difficulty, the study examined the cases of men convicted of minor crimes of violence before and after a reform which increased the punishment for this particular type of offence. This reform thus gave rise to a situation where similar individuals served sentences of different lengths for the same types of crime.