Participation and Frequency in Criminal Convictions across 25 Successive Birth Cohorts: Collectivity, Polarization, or Convergence?

Abstract

Against the backdrop of an overall declining crime trend our overarching objective is to explore whether this development has concealed any degree of divergence between participation and frequency in crime. We employ Swedish longitudinal data comprising 25 complete birth cohorts born between 1960 and 1984 and followed to age 30 using convictions data. The results show a complex pattern of change, by which the crime rate partly conceals divergent processes between participation and frequency. In particular, among the males we find a consistent decrease in the size of the convicted population, whereas the frequency of crimes among convicted offenders has increased across cohorts born during the early 1970s and later. We discuss the results against both behavioral and reactional mechanisms and conclude that future crime trends research should consider a broad range of criminal career parameters which cannot be discerned using aggregate crime data.

Changing routine activities and the decline of youth crime: A repeated cross‐sectional analysis of self‐reported delinquency in Sweden, 1999–2017*

“…(2021) accounted for approximately a third of the trend. Future analyses should compare the temporal trends of crime frequency (our dependent variable) with those of crime prevalence (Baumer et al.’s dependent variable; Berg et al., 2016; Sivertsen et al., 2019). Also, more studies from other countries may help to shed light on these discrepancies.…”

“…More recently, research on the crime drop has extended to youth crime, which is the focus of this article. Declining trends in youth crime have been found in several countries, such as Spain (Fernández‐Molina & Bartolomé Gutiérrez, 2020), Finland (Elonheimo, 2014; Salmi, 2009), Denmark (Balvig, 2011), Sweden (Estrada, 2019; Sivertsson et al., 2019; Svensson & Ring, 2007; Vasiljevic et al., 2020), the United States (Arnett, 2018; Baumer et al., 2018; Grucza et al., 2018; Keyes et al., 2018; Moss et al., 2019), England and Wales (Griffiths & Norris, 2020), Scotland (Matthews & Minton, 2018), and the Netherlands (Berghuis & de Waard, 2017; van der Laan et al., 2019). The decline has been found in both self‐report studies and police‐recorded data, and it applies to different crime types, such as property crimes, violence, and vandalism (e.g., Arnett, 2018; Moss et al., 2019).…”

“…The decline has been found in both self‐report studies and police‐recorded data, and it applies to different crime types, such as property crimes, violence, and vandalism (e.g., Arnett, 2018; Moss et al., 2019). Some studies, though, showed the decline to be more pronounced for property crimes than for violence (e.g., Fernández‐Molina & Bartolomé Gutiérrez, 2020; Salmi, 2009; Sivertsson et al., 2019) and for boys than for girls (Estrada et al., 2016; Keyes et al., 2018).…”

Sociohistorical context and post-prison life course

“…Later studies using multi-cohort designs have revealed that similar individuals born in different years display different offending trajectories due to exposure to different societal contexts during their life course. The use of multi-cohort designs and Scandinavian register data have also revealed that changes in aggregate rates of crime may hide changes in the criminal offending of cohorts born in different years (Sivertsson, Nilsson, and Bäckman 2021).…”

Severe violent victimization and labour market exclusion: The significance of the victim–offender overlap

“…For example, research has found that experiences of victimization alter youths’ views of the costs and benefits of violence, increasing the risks of subsequent offending (Averdijk et al, 2016; Farrell and Zimmerman, 2018). According to this stream of research, violence begets violence by inducing mal-adaptive coping strategies that are risky, for example, substance use, delinquency and retaliation, which may offer short-term gratification but often increase problems in the longer run and may carry with it further victimization (Turanovic and Pratt, 2013, 2014) in a cycle of violence (Widom, 1989). A related branch of research has given subcultural accounts of this vicious cycle (Bernard, 1990; Kennedy and Baron, 1993) where a ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1998, 1999) embodies a set of informal rules governing interaction.…”