Two months in custody

On average two months in custody - but this varies greatly

In order to study the length of time inmates spend in custody, we will look at departures from custody in 2001, and in some preceding years. A departure from custody may either lead to continued incarceration to serve a sentence, or to a release from prison. Table 1 shows the number of such departures from 1998 to 2001, and the average amount of time the prisoners spent in custody, by the principal offence in the charge against them.

Those held in custody spend on average a little over sixty days behind bars, although these numbers vary greatly depending on the alleged offence. Those held in custody based on charges of narcotics offences spend more than 80 days in prison prior to their departure or transfer to serving a sentence. Economic crimes, on the other hand, do not seem to warrant as lengthy incarcerations to custody. There are no major changes in the overall number of people held in custody, nor in the length of time they spend in custody from 1998 to 2001, but there are some changes on the type of offences the inmates are charged of. Sexual offences and violent offences are on the rise among those held in custody, while crimes for profit seem to be a decreasing reason for these incarcerations.

Shortest average custody time in Hamar

The types of crimes in the charge against them are not the only defining characteristics of those held in custody in Norwegian prisons; we will also look at their social background. The imprisonment statistics provides three variables to measure social background, namely age, gender, and citizenship. We will also look at the region in which the inmates encountered the police, as measured by the police district that handled each case of incarceration. Table 2 shows the distribution of departures from custody on these variables, along with the average amount of time the prisoners spent in custody.

The vast majority of those held in custody are men. Women constitute 8 percent of those who departed from custody in 2001, and they had spent less time behind bars than the men: 23 days less, on average. Furthermore, the older prisoners spend more time behind bars when they are held in custody, than the younger ones. The average for those of 30 years or more was 75 days, compared with 44 days for those in the youngest age-category of 15 to 20 year-olds. We see a similar substantial difference between Norwegians and non-Norwegian citizens in terms of prison time: those without Norwegian citizenship are held 29 days more in custody on average, than the Norwegians are. This difference is particularly great for those charged of narcotics offences: 137 days. One of the reasons for these major differences is that the police and the courts in Norway hold the view that foreign citizens are more likely to leave the country when charged of an offence, than those with Norwegian citizenship. Hence, foreigners are held in custody more frequently and for longer periods of time. We should note that this one explanation does not preclude other possible explanations for why foreign citizens in custody spend more time behind bars than Norwegians do.

We have measured the regional variable by police district, and have thus divided the country into seven regions: Northern Norway, Trøndelag, Western Norway, Hedmark and Oppland, Agder and Rogaland, Oslo and Akershus, and South Eastern Norway. We also have an "other" category, which consists of a few cases from the arctic region of Svalbard as well as some cases handled by øKRIM, a national police bureau in charge of economic offences. The police districts of Oslo and some of the surrounding districts in Akershus handle the largest numbers of cases. These districts also incarcerate people to custody for the longest periods of time: 75 days, on average. The rural districts of Hedmark and Oppland are at the opposite end of the scale: prisoners are held an average of 46 days in custody there. The police district of Hamar in Hedemark had the shortest average time in custody in the country, with an average of 25 days.

What matters the most?

Our analysis thus far has revealed several major differences in time in custody, between people of different social backgrounds. There may be some causal effects at work between these variables. We may for instance hypothesize that an especially large number of foreign nationals are held in custody in Oslo and Akershus, and that may explain the high average time in custody in those police districts. In order to control for those types of effects, we have performed a multivariate analysis. A multivariate analysis shows the effect of the independent variables, controlled for the other variables.

The results indicate that age, citizenship, and types of offences have the greatest effect on the amount of time inmates spend in custody. The multivariate analysis shows only minor regional differences, while the difference between men and women is reduced. Hence, older inmates, foreign nationals, and those charged of certain types of offences, such as narcotics offences or offences for profit, spend the longest time in custody. When we control for all other variables, 20-year-olds spend an average of 16 days less in custody than 30-year-olds; foreign nationals spend 34 days more in custody than Norwegians; those charged of narcotics offences spend an average of 48 days more in custody than those charged of economic crimes.

Despite these major differences, the overall explained variance of these variables combined, is only 5 percent. That is, we cannot explain 95 percent of the variance in time in custody with these variables. This large amount of unexplained variance may indicate that what really matters are the police and courts' individual judgment in each case. Their judgments depend mostly on other factors than what we have measured in our analysis.

More about the analysis

The results of the multivariate analysis are in table 3. The first column shows the unstandardized regression coefficients, which may be interpreted as the average change in the number of days in custody with one unit change in each independent variable. We have used "other offences" as a reference category for the offence-variables, and "Oslo and Akershus" as a reference for the regional variables. The unstandardized coefficients indicate the average difference in time in custody (measured in days) between the reference categories and the categories in the left column of table 3. The second column in table 3 displays the standardized coefficients. These values enable us to compare the effect of one variable with that of another. The greatest effects are those with an absolute value closest to 1, while the weakest effects are close to zero. Finally, the table displays the statistical value of R ² , which is the amount of explained variance of the model as a whole; i.e. the amount of variance of the dependent variable that can be explained by the independent variables.