Dissertation

On life course after prison in Finland: is context all you need?

Abstract

Criminal sanctions affect the life courses of convicted individuals in many ways. This dissertation aimed to characterise the long-term impact of incarceration on individuals’ employment, mortality and social integration over the past 30 years. The dissertation is a summary of three studies examining the lives of formerly incarcerated people in Finland. The first study used registry data on Finnish individuals (N = 10,887) who had sought treatment for substance use between 1990 and 2009. The study analysed the association between criminal sanctions and mortality using discrete-time survival models. The specific focus was on all-cause mortality and drug-related mortality. The models controlled for age and sociodemographic factors, and analysed whether education, type of substance used and type of latest sentence modified the association. 
The main finding was that mortality was high in the first two weeks after sanctions (all-cause odds ratio [OR] 2.61, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.67–4.07; drug-related deaths OR 8.52, 95% CI 4.64–15.7). Excess risk declined over time but remained elevated (OR after 12 weeks: 1.19, 95% CI 1.07–1.31). Most of the excess risk was attributable to external causes. Mortality was low during imprisonment but not during community sanctions. The patterns were similar by level of education, substance use and type of latest sentence. Study II examined employment, housing, and marriages among formerly incarcerated people in Finland. The people in the study (N = 23,350) were released between 1995 and 2014 and were followed until 2019 using administrative data. The link between selected macro-level indicators and employment, housing, and marriage was estimated using age-period-cohort models. The results showed that the outcomes evolved in separate ways post-release. 
The results showed that 11.1% of the study population was employed and 44.7% recidivated in the first 6 months. We found that the most common employers were the construction and manufacturing industries, along with temporary work agencies. Our models indicated that demand for low-skill labour in construction increased the likelihood of employment (β = 0.0108, se = 0.0026) but did not reduce the risk of recidivism (β = 0.0030, se = 0.0045). In sum, these results highlight the relative importance of the first months after release, as this is the period when people should be directed to treatment and housing. As the sociohistorical context was able to explain relatively little of the observed changes, robust theory and methods are required to explore alternative explanations and thus gain a better understanding of life after prison in Finland and elsewhere.