The risk-relevance of psychiatric disorders for women’s recidivism following release from prison in Norway: A national cohort study

• In Event: Gender, Crime and Justice Working Group Panel 6: Women in prison

Abstract

Background: Mental health problems are highly prevalent among women who experience incarceration and might have important implications for treatment needs and correctional outcomes. However, little is known about the risk relevance of specific psychiatric disorders in this population or how this risk might be moderated by other gender-specific risk factors. With access to high quality national registry data spanning a broad range of relevant variables, we employ a prospective study design to investigate the association between recent psychiatric history (as defined by clinical diagnoses recorded in health care records) and recidivism in all women released from a Norwegian prison over a ten year period (2011 to 2020; n = 4920). Acknowledging that recidivism is a heterogeneous and sometimes arbitrarily defined construct, we describe and measure return to crime in a manner that is both gender-informed and comprehensive. Based on previous research in fields such as feminist criminology, social psychology and forensic psychiatry we develop and test several hypothesis about women’s recidivism, and how it might be associated with mental illness.
Research Question: How does a recent history of psychiatric disorders contribute to women’s recidivism following release from prison in Norway? And does this relationship vary by different types of recidivism (e.g, time to any crime; any crime other than most common misdemeanours or drug use; violent crime) or when adjusted for relevant gender-specific (e.g., motherhood, custody of children, civil status and partners criminal status), context specific (e.g., opioid maintenance treatment) and gender-neutral (e.g., history of previous incarceration, parents criminal record, substance use) risk factors.

Authors

• Vegard G Svendsen, University of Oslo

• Marianne Riksheim Stavseth, University of Oslo

• Torbjørn Skardhamar, University of Oslo

• Anne Bukten, University of Oslo