School is regarded as a central arena for crime prevention. This study analyses the effects of student perceptions of school contextual aspects on self-reported offending, using logistic regression with control for clustering effects. The data comprise a census of pupils in year nine in comprehensive school (15 year olds) and in year two of upper secondary school (17 year olds) in the City of Stockholm in 2006, 2008 and 2010 (n = 25,850 of which 47% are boys and 53% are girls). Besides showing that several aspects of students’ perceptions of the school setting have direct protective effects on offending, the study shows that perceiving schoolwork as meaningful appears to moderate the effect of adverse home conditions on delinquency for boys. The only aspect of school investigated in this study that was not significantly related to offending was the perception of classroom order, indicating that emotional support from teachers is more important for crime preventive implications than maintaining order in the classroom. Controlling for clustering effects shows differences in offending between classes and schools that are not produced by differences between the students.

This study employs Macro-level Strain Theory (MST) as a framework to provide a better understanding of the way in which the structural and social context of Stockholm schools covaries with self-reported violent and general offending. The findings contribute to the literature in this area by directing a special focus at the interplay between the theory’s macro-level components and some individual-level mechanisms that may be assumed to condition the effect of strain on offending. Using multi-level data on 5274 students nested in 90 schools in the City of Stockholm, the study notes significant contextual effects of anger and life dissatisfaction on offending. School-level deprivation appears to have a confounding effect on the relationship between school-contextual negative affect and offending. Further, school-contextual anger influences some individuals more than others. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Influenced by the theoretical concepts of ‘Relative deprivation’ and ‘Social cohesion’, this study adds to the relatively limited literature of socio-structural approaches to the school–crime relationship. Multilevel analysis was conducted to explore the independent and interactive effects ofthree distinct features of the school setting—concentrated (dis)advantage, the proportion of students with poor future prospects and teacher-rated social cohesion—in relation to self-reported offending. Using information from three data sources on 4,608 students and 1,056 teachers from 77 lower secondary schools in Stockholm, the results showed that school concentrated (dis)advantageand school-level future prospects were directly related to offending. In addition, cross-level interactionsindicate that the association between student performance and offending differs dependingon school type.