Torbjørn Skardhamar

Changes in criminal offending around the time of job entry: A study of employment and desistance

Does employment promote desistance from crime? Most perspectives assume that individuals who become employed are less likely to offend than those who do not. The critical issue has to do with the timing of employment transitions in the criminal trajectory. The turning point hypothesis expects reductions in offending after job entries, whereas the maturation perspective assumes desistance to have occurred ahead of successful transitions to legitimate work. Focusing on a sample of recidivist males who became employed during 2001-2006 (N = 783), smoothing spline regression techniques were used to model changes in criminal offending around the point of entry to stable employment. Consistent with the maturation perspective, the results showed that most offenders had desisted prior to the employment transition and that becoming employed was not associated with further reductions in criminal behavior. Consistent with the turning point hypothesis, we identified a subset of offenders who became employed during an active phase of the criminal career and experienced substantial reductions in criminal offending thereafter. However, this trajectory describes less than 2 percent of the sample. The patterns observed in this research suggest that transition to employment is best viewed as a consequence rather than as a cause of criminal desistance. Language: en

Nordic Register Data and Their Untapped Potential for Criminological Knowledge

The Nordic countries have developed similar advanced register data systems for purposes of producing official statistics and research. The register’s advantages in criminological research include the ability to maintain data on the total population; the possibility of studying small subpopulations; a virtually continuous timeline in longitudinal data sets; using panel data designs with no sample attrition; having few or no nonresponses or other missing data; making connections between different observation units, such as family members; and the ability to construct research designs that are practically impossible with surveys. Use of register data for research requires legislation that protects the privacy of individuals and regulates access to data. Register data have been used extensively in demographic, economic, and sociological research. There is a huge and largely untapped potential for their use in criminological research.

Changes in Criminal Offending around the Time of Marriage

Objectives: The authors investigate whether the argument from life-course criminology that marriage leads to reduction in crime or whether the mechanisms leading to lower crime rates might take effect in a period of courtship before the transition to marriage. Method: Using data from population-wide, longitudinal Norwegian administrative registers, the authors estimate within-individual offending propensities before and after marriage for all men marrying in Norway 1997–2001. This approach allows for studying how offending develops over a decade around the time of marriage, for those men who actually marry. Results: The propensity to offend declines sharply prior to marriage. After marriage, there is a small increase in offending. This holds both for all offenses and when the analysis is restricted to felony offenses. Conclusions: The analysis provides no evidence for an effect of marriage on offending. Rather, the results suggest that the lower offending rates of marrieds develop over the years prior to marriage rather than as a consequence of the marriage.

Does parental income matter for onset of offending

Although several established theories of crime often suggest an association between socioeconomic background and youth criminal involvement, the empirical evidence for such claims diverges considerably. The aim of this paper is to re-investigate the relationship between family income and criminal charges using Norwegian register data. The longitudinal data sources used in the study encompass the entire resident population from five birth cohorts, and allow us to identify youths charged with crime from 1992 to 2005. We link information on these youths with information on family earnings for several years. We find that family academic resources are more important than family income for onset of offending. This applies to all kinds of offences, except for serious theft.

Does Marriage Reduce Crime

The “marriage effect” is one of the most widely studied topics of life course criminology. The contemporary consensus is that marriage promotes desistance from crime. Most of the 58 studies reviewed here find a negative longitudinal association between marriage and crime. The results are more consistent among men. Studies that attend to relationship quality, such as the level of marital attachment, tend to produce particularly strong associations. Critical scrutiny of the evidence regarding the causal nature of the reported associations suggests, however, that claims about the restraining influence of marriage are overstated. None of the studies demonstrates evidence of direct (counterfactual) causality; no study has served a causal estimate unbiased by selection processes. Moreover, only a few studies address time ordering, and some of those show that desistance precedes rather than follows marriage. Evidence in support of the theoretical mechanisms responsible for the marriage effect is also mixed and insufficient. The criminological literature has been insensitive to the reality that entering a marital union is increasingly unlikely to signify the point at which a committed, high-quality relationship is formed.

Immigrant crime in Norway and Finland

Immigrants are known to be overrepresented in the crime statistics of Nordic countries. However, the composition of immigrant populations varies across countries both in terms of immigrants’ country of origin as well as their population structure (age and sex). Cross-country comparison of crime rates is always difficult because of differences in legal systems, but it is even more challenging when using very broad categories of immigrants, lumping heterogeneous groups together. Previous studies have largely compared the entire immigrant population of a country with the majority population, which under-appreciates the heterogeneity that exists across immigrant groups. In this paper, we compare the crime rates in Norway and Finland, while adding additional nuances by reporting crime rates for 25 specific immigrant groups relative to the majority population. The data are gathered from Finnish and Norwegian administrative records, representing or comprising the resident population aged 15–64. We analyse both violent crime and property crime, and we present the results adjusted for population structure (sex and age). The results show considerable similarity in the rank order of crime rates of immigrant groups in the two Nordic countries. Although the current study is mainly descriptive, it aims to set some limits to what it is to be explained. In fact, the diversity is so great that it is questionable whether one should treat immigrants as one single group at all. Whatever the causal mechanisms driving immigrant crime are, it seems plausible that some similar processes are operating across the Nordic region.

Pick a Number: Mapping Recidivism Measures and Their Consequences

The Nordic countries are often seen as “exceptional” in that they have moderate punitive policies while also having low rates of crime and recidivism. It is, however, a challenge for comparative recidivism research that recidivism is measured in widely disparate ways. We exploit the richness and flexibility of Norwegian registry data to examine how and how much national recidivism rates may be affected by how, among whom, and for how long recidivism is measured. Our results vary from 9% to 53%, and these numbers could—notwithstanding scientific scrutiny—be taken as a validation as well as a debunking of the abovementioned notion of the Nordic penal exceptionalism.

Relative mortality among criminals in Norway and the relation to drug and alcohol related offenses.

Background Registered offenders are known to have a higher mortality rate, but given the high proportion of offenders with drug-addiction, particularly among offenders with a custodial sentence, higher mortality is expected. While the level of overall mortality compared to the non-criminal population is of interest in itself, we also estimate the risk of death by criminal records related to substance abuse and other types of criminal acts, and separate between those who receive a prison sentence or not. Methods Age-adjusted relative risks of death for 2000–2008 were studied in a population based dataset. Our dataset comprise the total Norwegian population of 2.9 million individuals aged 15–69 years old in 1999, of whom 10% had a criminal record in the 1992–1999 period. Results Individuals with a criminal record have twice the relative risk (RR) of death of the control group (non-offenders). Males with a record of use/possession of drugs and a prison record have an 11.9 RR (females, 15.6); males with a drug record but no prison record have a 6.9 RR (females 10.5). Males imprisoned for driving under the influence of substances have a 4.4 RR (females 5.6); males with a record of driving under the influence but no prison sentence have a 3.2 RR (females 6.5). Other male offenders with a prison record have a 2.8 RR (females 3.7); other male offenders with no prison record have a 1.7 RR (females 2.3). Conclusion Significantly higher mortality was found for people with a criminal record, also for those without any record of drug use. Mortality is much higher for those convicted of substance-related crimes: more so for drug- than for alcohol-related crimes and for women.

If it works there, will it work here?: The effect of a multi-component responsible beverage service (RBS) programme on violence in Oslo

BACKGROUND The Stockholm Prevents Alcohol and Drug Problems (STAD) programme has been regarded as one of the most successful programmes to date, in reducing alcohol-related violence. This multi-component Responsible Beverage Service (RBS) programme was implemented in Stockholm, Sweden, and has been documented to be extremely effective in reducing alcohol-related nightlife violence. The SALUTT programme in Oslo, Norway was carefully modelled on the STAD project. AIM We investigate whether the results from STAD were replicated in the SALUTT intervention. DESIGN Using geocoded data, the level of violence in the intervention area was compared with different control areas before and after the intervention. STATISTICS Autoregressive moving average models (ARIMA). FINDINGS The SALUTT programme had no statistically significant effect on violence. However, the level of violence in the different potential control areas of Oslo fluctuated without a clear common trend. Hence, it was difficult to establish proper control areas. CONCLUSIONS The results from the Swedish STAD-intervention were not replicated in Oslo. Successful interventions are not necessarily replicated in other contexts, and the current literature does not shed sufficient light on the conditions under which such interventions actually work. Moreover, more attention should be devoted to the identification of adequate control areas in future research.

The criminal career of men convicted of rape: evidence from a Norwegian national cohort

Abstract The extent to which sexual offenders are a group separate from other types of offenders has been debated for many years and investigated from different perspectives. The present study investigated similarities and differences regarding socio-economic background, criminal history and recidivism involving new crimes between rape offenders and three other groups: other sexual offenders, non-sexual violent offenders and other offenders. Data came from Norwegian population registers containing information on all crimes investigated from 1992 to 2012. The sample consisted of all persons convicted in 2002 and 2003 (N = 36,951). Background characteristics and estimated recidivism risk was described using hazard models. Results indicated that men convicted of rape (n = 142) had lower levels of education and that a higher percentage of them were on social benefits compared to the other crime groups. A large majority (79%) of rape-convicted men had previous convictions. Rape offenders were considerably more criminally active and diverse than the other crime groups. Prior criminal record, irrespective of type, increased the risk of recidivism in general. Controlling for other background characteristics did not alter this outcome. Treatment of convicted rapists needs to take into consideration that this offender group has much in common with violent offenders in general.