["Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 162-170, June 2021. ", "\nAbstract\n\nBackground\nConcerns have been raised that people detained in secure hospitals after a criminal act spend longer in a locked institution than people sent to prison for similar offending, but research evidence is scarce and conflicting.\n\n\nAims\nTo compare the length of secure hospitalisation of people convicted of crimes for which flexible sentencing is allowed with length of time in prison for people serving a prison sentence for similar crimes who were not found mentally ill.\n\n\nMethods\nA records‐based, retrospective study was conducted comparing length of stay of all inpatients in one medium security hospital in Poland, hospitalised between 2014 and 2018, who had been convicted of any interpersonal crime other than homicide or attempted homicide, and data on all sentenced prisoners in Poland on 09.05.2018 convicted of a similar range of offences. Homicide was excluded because, in Poland, it usually attracts a fixed sentence–a life sentence until the 1970s and currently a 25‐year imprisonment–so disrupting comparisons.\n\n\nResults\nEighty‐two patients completed their secure hospital stay within the study period or were still hospitalised at the census point 09.05.2018, only 10 of them women. Male patients convicted of stalking or similar threatening offence or ‘mistreatment’ spent, on average, almost twice as long confined to hospital than men sentenced to imprisonment spent in prison (28.8 months, respectively). By contrast, men hospitalised after sex offences were confined for over three years less than those sentenced to prison. Only bodily harm offences attracted comparable lengths of stay in hospital and prison.\n\n\nConclusions\nOur findings confirm significant disparities in length of time spent in a closed institution after offences of serious interpersonal violence, according to whether that institution was prison or hospital, but not all in the same direction. Next steps should explore reasons for this and relative longer‐term outcomes.\n\n"]