Court Delays and Criminal Recidivism: Results from Danish Administrative Data and a Policy Reform

Abstract

Delays at court are an everlasting and potentially consequential reality of criminal justice systems, although most would agree that the timely adjudication of cases is needed from both administrative, judicial, and individual perspectives. This paper uses administrative data and a policy reform in Denmark in 2007 to measure the unconfounded association between court delays – or, more specifically, time to adjudication – and criminal recidivism within 5 years. Results show that although court delays do not push more people into recidivism, the delays matter for how many crimes recidivists end up being convicted of. Also, criminality tends to be muted during the period from charge to adjudication (even in a context with low use of pretrial detention and no bail system), whereby court delays also matter for the timing of new crimes – a finding with important theoretical implications.

Keywords:

• Administrative data
• court delays
• natural experiment
• recidivism
• time to adjudication

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the working group on Nordic register-based studies in criminology, workshop participants at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Valerio Bacak, Jason Schnittker, and Peter Fallesen for comments to previous versions of the manuscript, and thanks Martin L. Trinhammer for research assistance. Any errors are, of course, the author’s responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Loeffler and Nagin (2022) review well-identified (random judge assignment and sentencing thresholds) studies of the effects of imprisonment on recidivism and concludes that the endogeneity challenge may not be that consequential after all (for the imprisonment-recidivism link, at least) as long as one can control for relevant control variables. The problem is, of course, to know which variables are most important to control for and when enough control variables are added. In my setup, there is no administrative measure of drug use history or gang affiliation, for example, which could be important for the celerity-recidivism link. Thus, given the nature of the data for this study, a design-driven approach to obtaining unconfounded estimates must be considered superior to standard statistical control.

2 Swiftness of punishment also plays a significant role in probation practices promoted by project HOPE (Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement). HOPE focuses on providing swift, certain, and fair responses to violations of probation conditions for drug offenders in the US. Following promising initial results that echo the expectations from Deterrence Theory, the project was soon expanded to other areas than Hawaii where it started and to other (non-drugs) types of offenders (see Cullen et al., 2018 for a discussion of the expansion of HOPE). Based on the initial results from evaluations of HOPE (e.g., Hawken & Kleiman, 2009) we should thus expect time to adjudication to matter for the risk of new crimes, in the sense that longer time to adjudication increases the crime response. A recent multisite evaluation of HOPE later found, however, the discouraging result that HOPE was unlikely to have impacted rates of criminal recidivism to any meaningful degree (Lattimore et al., 2018).

3 I deleted 1,072 cases (0.4 percent of the data) to clean the administrative records from the Danish National Police (307 had missing information on the merged covariates and 765 had zero or negative time to adjudication).

4 See Table A2 for the full set of parameter estimates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology under Grant Title Maintaining the Policy Relevance of Criminology by Improving Research Integrity: A Nordic Collaboration with Register Data, and by the ROCKWOOL Foundation (grant number 1198).