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This article tests whether an alcohol treatment program for drunk drivers in Denmark increased the stability of their relationships with spouses or cohabiting partners. The treatment program, implemented in 1990, allowed a group of offenders to avoid prison and participate in a rehabilitation program. I use it here as a natural experiment, exploiting a rich administrative dataset to show that the program marginally increases offenders' relationship stability. I also test whether increased relationship stability observed among the treated offenders results from their pardon from prison or from their participation in the rehabilitation program. Results suggest that the rehabilitation program drives the effect. These findings contribute to the literature on what alternative sanctions could be offered to offenders to improve their long-term social outcomes.

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the reform affected a child's risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specifically, we use a difference‐in‐differences framework to compare all Danish children 12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead of incarceration under the reform [N = 1,546] with a reference group of children whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N = 1,852] in the 2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing the effects of the reform on children's risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28 years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.