Legal responses to drug offences and drink-driving: The potential of court-imposed care to prevent reconvictions

In recent decades, considerable doubts have arisen concerning the deterrent effects of incarceration, in particular concerning substance-dependent offenders, and there has been a revived emphasis on rehabilitation within criminal justice interventions. This study utilised Swedish register data to investigate the utilisation of court-imposed care in Sweden from 1988 to 2020 and assessed its potential to prevent reconvictions among individuals convicted of drug offences and aggravated drink-driving. To achieve this, time-fixed effects regressions were employed, including Poisson regressions to estimate post-sentence differences in the reconviction incidence rate and modified Poisson regressions using Generalised Linear Models (GLM) to assess relative risks (RR). The findings demonstrate that, while court-imposed care has declined, this decline is mainly driven by a reduction in drink-driving cases resulting in a contract care sentence. Court-imposed care was weakly associated with a lower risk of reconviction and a lower reconviction incidence rate than incarceration. The results remain robust after accounting for numerous pre-sentencing factors, including demographic characteristics, criminal history, social status, and health. However, sensitivity analyses suggest that there may exist unobserved differences between the groups which may drive the results. The study raises concerns about the effectiveness of incarcerating a substantial portion of substance-dependent offenders.