Research Summary
We studied the effect on unemployment social welfare dependence of serving a sentence under elec-tronic monitoring rather than in prison, using Danish registry data and two policy shifts that extended the use of electronic monitoring in Denmark. We found electronic monitoring is less harmful than imprisonment, at least for younger offenders, whereas it does not leave older offenders worse off than imprisonment.

Policy Implications
As the United States moves towards noncustodial alternatives to imprisonment, it makes sense for policy makers to direct their attention to experiences from other contexts. The experiences from Denmark are clear: Electronic monitoring is less harmful than imprisonment to the life course out-comes of offenders. Since electronic monitoring could also very well be less costly for the corrections administrations than imprisonment, efforts to extend the use of electronic monitoring in the United States could be accelerated.