ABSTRACT
In order to study the issue of custodial openness in relation to re-offending and also its significance for institutional everyday life, this study has collected both quantitative and qualitative data. The qualitative material is comprised of interviews with staff and convicted youths. There are six institutions that have special places for boys serving youth custody sentences and one with special places for girls. Interviews with staff (29 in total) have been conducted at all these institutions. The staff have been interviewed about how youth custody sentences are implemented and about issues related to preparing the youths for the time following the completion of their sentences. Interviews have been conducted with boys serving youth custody sentences (32 in total) at all of the six institutions that have special places for boys serving this kind of sentence. The boys have been asked about how they experience their time at the institution and about their relations with and opinions about the staff. The interviews focused on the youths’ experiences of being incarcerated and their ideas about the time following the completion of their sentence. In these interviews, a special focus was directed at how the youths experience institutional leave and more open forms of custody. The quantitative data consist of a five-year follow-up of boys sentenced to youth custody between 1999 and 2006.1 The data include control variables from the time prior to the sentence, variables containing information about the time spent in youth custody (such as instances of institutional leave, but also, for example, information about different types of behaviour during the time spent at the institution) and detailed follow-up data on registered offending. A non-experimental study always faces the risk that the results in the form of differences in re-offending may in fact be due to other factors related to the risk for re-offending or to the likelihood of being given leave or of being placed on an open unit. At the same time, however, the data employed in this study provide multiple opportunities to include controls for various factors relating to the time both prior to and during the youth custody sentence. One advantage of using a mix of methods and data is that the different elements contribute different understandings and thus allow for the development of deeper insights into the phenomenon under study. The combination of data sources employed in this study should thus not be viewed as a form of triangulation
that has the objective of producing more reliable conclusions. Instead, following Giordano and colleagues (Giordano et al. 2002 p. 991) I have found value in the different forms of knowledge provided by the different data sources. This means that my primary intention is not to identify ways in which the different data sources provide confirmation for one another, even though I do on occasion link the data sources together in this way. At the same time, however, the data from the qualitative interviews are central to interpreting and understanding the quantitative findings and to contextualising these results. The remainder of this chapter provides a more detailed presentation of the data and conduct of the study.
