People with convictions often face financial challenges, which hinder desistance from crime as they have few legal opportunities to address their financial burdens. In some countries, those severely insolvent can apply for 'debt settlement' through Enforcement Authorities. This study explores whether such settlements are crime-preventative for people with conviction histories. Analyzing Swedish administrative data and a sample of 1,621 previously convicted applicants in 2016-17, we match and compare reconviction rates between approved and declined cases. Approved cases show much lower reconviction rates, but this effect diminishes rapidly, virtually disappearing within six months. These findings prompt a discussion of the helpfulness of debt settlements for people wanting to desist from crime. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed.

Individuals with childhood experience of out-of-home care (OHC) face elevated risks of criminal behavior and poor mental health compared with the majority population. Evidence on how trajectories of offending and psychiatric disorders covary among individuals with experience of OHC is needed. This study is based on a cohort of 14,608 individuals (n = 1,319 with OHC experience) born in the Stockholm metropolitan area in 1953 (49% women) from birth to age 63 (2016). Group-based multi-trajectory modeling among those with at least one offense or psychiatric disorder (40.5% of the men, 16.6% of the women) identified four co-occurring trajectories for both sexes. Multinomial regression analyses showed that adolescent OHC placement, particularly in institutions and for behavioral reasons, was linked to higher odds of early-adulthood-limited or decreasing offending and psychiatric trajectories. Most individuals recover from offending and psychiatric disorders by retirement, but placed individuals in particular remain at high risk for offending, alongside psychiatric disorders, throughout early adulthood. Early assessment and tailored attention to needs and risk levels is important when designing long-term care services to mitigate this. Research on underlying mechanisms, and on collaboration between the welfare, justice, and psychiatric care systems, can help to design effective intervention strategies and policies.

Aims: Involvement in minor drug offences at an early age can be a signal of the onset of a potential drug issue. This is why Sweden has considered the criminalization of personal use as a strategy to deter the progression of drug use. This study investigated how the judiciary and social services succeed in identifying and providing support to adolescents convicted of drug offences. Methods: Characteristics of all 15–17-year-olds convicted of offences against the Act on Penal Law on Narcotics (drug offence) in 2017 were examined using Swedish longitudinal registry data (N = 1847). Furthermore, the decision process rendering different legal responses was examined by use of social services files for a subsample of 189 adolescents. Results: About two-thirds of the adolescents had their first conviction for the index offence and the majority received legal responses consisting of rehabilitative measures. Background factors indicated that those with severe drug and criminal issues encounter risk factors relating to their upbringing (e.g., neuropsychiatric disorders were notably more prevalent in this group than among similar peers). Around 61% of adolescents were reconvicted for new drug offences during the three-year study period, but with variations among subgroups. Younger boys who received rehabilitative measures had lower reconviction rates compared to those without. Conclusions: Addressing the underlying factors contributing to adolescent drug offences requires a multifaceted approach that prioritizes early intervention, personalized support, and collaboration across systems to promote positive outcomes and reduce recidivism rates.

Crime is unequally distributed with respect to both who becomes involved in offending and the frequency with which these individuals offend. However, we know less about how these properties of the crime distribution have themselves changed over time. In cases where crime levels have changed, have these changes been general, affecting all social groups equally, or have they been more focused on certain social groups? We examine the changing social composition of known offenders using Swedish administrative data to determine whether inequality in offending is increasing or decreasing. Our analyses are based on a multicohort approach. The results show that the proportion of convicted men has decreased. Those who are convicted for crimes have therefore become an increasingly selected group. This has also entailed that they have increasingly come to be made up of groups with less resourceful socio-economic backgrounds, which in turn has fostered a more unequal distribution of crime.

Objective: In recent decades, electronic monitoring (EM) has increasingly come to be used as an alternative to incarceration. However, EM’s long-term effects on offenders remain unclear, especially with regard to non-recidivism-related outcomes and reincarceration risks. This study focuses on the long-term impact of EM on recidivism, mortality, and labor market exclusion.

Method: The study utilizes administrative data, and focuses on a Swedish EM reform as a natural experiment with a difference-in-difference approach. The reform enabled offenders sentenced to up to six months’ imprisonment to serve their sentences under EM instead of in prison.

Results: The findings show that introducing the possibility to transform a prison stay to EM at home reduced 10-year reconviction and reincarceration rates. They also show that the reform had long-lasting decreasing effect on the likelihood of not being in education, employment, or training (NEET). The reform had, however, no effect on all-cause mortality or death by suicide. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effects are primarily driven by individuals who had a more stable labor market attachment prior to being sentenced to prison, which suggests that EM helps offenders sustain regular employment and that it decreases the criminogenic impact of labor market detachment. 

Conclusion: In addition to reducing the costs associated with recidivism and labor market exclusion, the reduced incarceration costs associated with transforming prison sentences to EM indicate that EM has the potential to produce net savings from a societal perspective.

It is widely acknowledged that individuals with out-of-home care (OHC) experiences, including foster-family care and residential care, face an increased risk of poor labour market attachment during emerging adulthood. However, limited understanding exists regarding how this attachment, conceptualized here as ‘not in employment, education, or training’ (NEET), evolves beyond young adulthood and the degree to which this development is marked by persistence or desistance. Using group-based trajectory modelling and multinomial regression on population-based register data for over 650,000 Swedish men and women (including approximately 14,000 with OHC experience), followed from birth to age 40, the results indicate that OHC-experienced individuals, especially those first placed as teenagers, exhibit a substantially higher risk of persistent NEET compared to peers without OHC experience. Nevertheless, the majority of OHC-experienced individuals followed pathways characterized by desistance. Implications for research, policy and practice are discussed.

Prior literature has linked experiences of out-of-home care (OHC, foster family care, and residential care) to numerous negative outcomes. However, less is known about the relationship between OHC experience and victimization, particularly compared to same-aged adolescents from the majority population. This study addresses this gap using Swedish repeated cross-sectional data from the Stockholm School Survey (n>140,000), of which approximately 1% report living in foster family care (FFC), to explore the prevalence of victimization and changes over time among youth in FFC compared to their non-FFC peers. Results from multivariable regression analyses indicate that FFC youth, especially girls, have substantially higher risks of various types of victimization, although at higher levels, FFC-experienced youth generally followed trends observed in peers. However, care-experienced girls showed an upward trend in threats and at least one type of victimization, contrary to a downward trend among peers. Implications for research and ongoing debates are discussed.

Objectives This study examines the relationship between incarceration time and post-release recidivism among first-time incarcerated adult offenders.

Methods A quasi-experimental design was adopted consisting of three policy reforms that were treated as separate natural experiments. While holding imposed sentence length constant, these policy reforms either decreased or increased the required share of a sentence inmates needed to be incarcerated before being eligible for parole. Data consisted of large-scale administrative records containing all convictions for the Swedish cohorts born in 1958 and later.

Results Results indicate that neither increased nor decreased incarceration time had a statistically significant effect on post-release recidivism, irrespective of how recidivism was measured.

Conclusions Findings reveal little evidence for incarceration time having a criminogenic or specific preventive effect on post-release recidivism.

Since the 1990s, Sweden has witnessed a steady increase in the control measures focused on drug offences. These changes are results of political dynamics once pushed by centre-right parties but thereafter embraced by Social Democrats in government. The article examines the structure of police controls of drug offences and the extent to which these controls have focused on different sociodemographic groups during the period 1995-2015. The study shows that this intensified control of minor drug crimes has resulted in successively larger proportions of youths from deprived areas being forced to provide samples of body fluids. The criminalization of drug use constitutes an example of the significance of crime policy for both crime levels and the composition of the offender population.