Unintentional injury mortality -The role of criminal offending. A Swedish longitudinal population based study

Abstract

The aim was to investigate life course criminality in relation to unintentional injury mortality and other causes of death among 49,398 male Swedish conscripts aged 18–20 years in 1969/70 and a follow-up through 35 years. All subjects completed two questionnaires at the time of conscription concerning family, social, behavioural risk factors including alcohol and drug use. The impacts of committed crimes, alcohol and drug use and other risk factors were estimated using proportional hazard ratios (HRs) from Cox regression analyses. Many adolescent offences entailed a nearly six-fold higher injury mortality risk (HR = 5.64) and a four-fold higher risk (HR = 3.93) for all other causes vs. no convictions. In multivariate analyses, adolescent criminality was still found to be significantly associated with time to unintentional injury mortality, while criminality limited to adulthood had a moderately higher risk for all other causes of deaths. Individuals with both adolescence and adult criminality showed elevated mortality from especially unintentional injury (HR = 5.06), with the hazards remaining elevated, even after adjustment for other behavioural risk factors. Men with behavioural risk factors including alcohol and/or drug misuse in combination with frequent criminality seem to be a vulnerable group of both unintentional and other causes of deaths.

Keywords:

• accidents
• alcohol
• crime
• drug misuse
• risk factors
• unintentional injuries
• overall mortality

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank statistician Anders Leifman for his constructive advises for the statistical processing and presentation of the data. The research for this study was supported by the organisation for the Co-ordination of the Swedish Drug Policy (Dnr: 2006:18).

Conflicts of interest

None.