Serving time or serving the community?
Externally reviewed
Exploiting a policy reform to assess the causal effects of community service on income, social benefit dependency and recidivism
Study Paper No. 37
Written by: Signe Hald Andersen
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.
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