Samenvatting

Electronic monitoring is increasingly used as an alternative to imprisonment. Compared to imprisonment, electronic monitoring presumably is less costly. Furthermore, compared to imprisonment electronic monitoring may have less collateral consequences, as detainees who are electronically monitored are able to keep their job, housing and social networks, which are in turn associated with reduced recidivism. On the other hand electronic monitoring may have less of a deterrent effect than imprisonment, and deviant networks also remain intact, which may increase the likelihood of future crime and with it the likelihood of re-imprisonment. Here we make use of data from the Belgian penitentiary register to compare re-imprisonment of those having served their sentence under electronic monitoring and those regularly imprisoned, and limit our analyses to offenders with a prison sentence between six months and three years. We use propensity score matching to control for pre-existing differences between these groups. Our findings show that detainees are less likely to be re-imprisoned after electronic monitoring than after regular imprisonment.