Societal change and individual past in connection with crime: demographic perspectives on young people arrested in northern Sweden in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Little is known about the lives of criminal offenders prior to their incarceration in past time. Knowing the background of offenders, however, may explain why they broke the law. This article explores young offenders in the Sundsvall region of Sweden, 400 kilometres north of Stockholm, an area with a booming sawmill-based economy in nineteenth-century Sweden. First, using prison registers, large-scale structural concepts are employed to explain the increasing number of incarcerations of young people reported during the period 1840–1880. Second, to uncover the offenders' demographic backgrounds and their socio-economic circumstances when arrested, they are identified in Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB) at Umeå University. These sources permit the application of retrospective life-course perspectives that are increasingly applied in modern criminology. These perspectives show that offenders were not primarily migrants or of poor origin, but that they frequently came from the region. Thus their parents were often also present in the community. In providing informal social control these characteristics – being local and having at least one parent nearby – are thought to lead to lower levels of criminality and imprisonment, but they were of little effect in preventing crime or incarceration. This study thus challenges the view of the criminal in past time as a lone individual arrested in an unfamiliar settings. Among the few female offenders observed, however, these factors were more typical; although gender accounts for low levels of criminality, their isolation and poverty did lead some women to theft.

Crime and individual and neighbourhood sociodemographic characteristics in the City of Toronto

“…In contrast, Table 4.13 indicated signs of multicollinearity between male and females with a significant value of (r= -.976 (p<0.01)). Additionally, the male variable also showed a significantly weak correlation which did not align with existing literature and studies that found the percent of male offenders increased with crime rates (Kruttschnitt, 2013;Pelfrey et al, 2016, Vikstrom et al, 2008. For those reasons, the male variable was removed.…”

A Database for the Future

“…There was also a great extent of lifecycleassociated poverty. Similar methods have been used by Lotta Vikström (2008Vikström ( , 2011 to study the lives of juvenile delinquents in the past. While being exposed to the legal system in youth did not necessarily lead to a criminal life or life in destitution, there were great differences in effects depending on gender.…”

Illuminating the Labeling Impact of Incarceration: Life-Course Perspectives of Young Offenders’ Pathways in Comparison to Non-Offenders in Nineteenth-Century Northern Sweden

“…18-47); Krohn (1995); McDonald (1982); Monkkonen (1981, pp. 551ff);Vikström (2008a). 89ff); Österberg (1991, pp.…”

“…The results presented in section 2 are more thoroughly discussed in Vikström (2006;2008a). (1994, pp.…”

“…Gendered reasons for which men and women were arrested and with regard to their demographic past are discussed in Vikström (2008a).…”