Research project Criminal Careers

Why do people engage in crime? Why do most offenders have relatively short criminal careers, while a select few have considerably longer, more serious careers? These issues are explored in depth through a cohort study of people born in Stockholm 1953.

In the research project The Long View: Criminal Careers in a Swedish Birth Cohort To Age 65, several contemporary criminological issues are studied: are some individuals more prone than others to do crime, or should differences in criminal careers primarily be explained by dynamic, changing factors? We utilize a longitudinal dataset, the well-known Stockholm Birth Cohort (SBC), which has previously been used in central contributions to our understanding of male and female offending careers – but then only to age 30. In this new, updated version of the SBC we are able to track and explain the development of crime in a representative birth cohort of nearly 15 000 individuals to age 65.