Punishment as a Vehicle for Change? The Causal Impact of Norwegian Corrections on Reoffending and Reintegration in Norway and Beyond

The main goal of the NoReoffend project is to advance scientific knowledge on the intended and unintended consequences of punishment. More specifically, we will explore what happens to the continued offending, labor market attachment and family situation of people who serve different sentences or complete their sentence in different ways. The main focus is on the Norwegian context, but the project will also use an ongoing prison reform project in Pennsylvania (USA) to consider the impact of the Norwegian approach to corrections in (one of) the United States. Methodologically speaking it is a central goal to disentangle correlations from causal effects in our analyses of the connection between punishment and life outcomes. Given the way the criminal justice system is structured we can expect to find systematic differences between people who are punished in different ways, and this creates methodological challenges when we seek to isolate the effect of punishment from other relevant factors. For instance, the Norwegian correctional services make decisions about the use of electronic monitoring (EM) based on a discretionary assessment of both criminal and personal characteristics. A straightforward comparison of, say reoffending and post-sentence unemployment rates, between those who serve a sentence in prison and those who serve a sentence on EM, is therefore anything but straightforward. Can a difference in outcomes be attributed to the effect of EM as compared to prison, or is it simply a result of pre-existing differences between the groups? No Reoffend will use various experimental designs to provide more precise answers to such questions. The project will rely on administrative register data on, amongst other things, criminal justice system involvement, labor market attachment, family and living situation. The results have a clear policy relevance both in Norway and abroad, and will contribute to continued theory development in this field.

The NoReoffend project seeks to advance the state-of-the-art on the intended and unintended consequences of punishment, using Norway as a case study. Norway and other Scandinavian countries are considered guiding stars in the world of criminal corrections, yet remarkably little is known about the effects of punishment in Norway – at least if we look through a lens of causality and quantitative rigor. The NoReoffend project draws on theories from criminology, sociology, psychology, and economics that speak to the myriad impacts of punishment on short- and long-term life outcomes. The project combines population-wide register data and experimental and quasi-experimental techniques to disentangle these processes empirically. Three more specific objectives guide the project. Firstly, NoReoffend will evaluate previous reforms in Norwegian corrections to identify the causal effects of various sentences, programs, and staffing policies on reoffending and reintegration. These analyses will contribute to the international literatures on the effects of imprisonment on reoffending and extralegal outcomes such as employment and family. Secondly, NoReoffend will develop, implement, and evaluate the first-ever randomized controlled trial(s) of programs designed to reduce reoffending and promote reintegration in the Norwegian setting. This will provide much-needed insight into fundamental theoretical questions about the impacts of imprisonment and broaden current evaluation practices in Norwegian corrections. Finally, the project will empirically investigate what happens to post-release outcomes when Norwegian correctional principles are implemented in the American context. This will test the generalizability of the Norwegian approach and provide evidence that supports – or challenges – much of the rhetoric surrounding Scandinavian penal practices.