Criminal convictions and immigrant background 1973–2017 in Sweden – have differences increased or declined?

ABSTRACT

This study investigates Swedish conviction trends by individuals’ immigrant background for the period 1973–2017. The central research question is whether relative differences in conviction levels have increased, declined or remained unchanged over recent decades. This question is examined in part using a traditional cross-sectional approach, and in part using a cohort-based approach. All results are presented by gender, and results for the cohort-based approach also by holding socioeconomic background constant. The results show that conviction levels have decreased, to a greater extent among men than among women, irrespective of immigrant background. The level of overrepresentation among those born in Sweden to foreign-born parents has increased somewhat, while the overrepresentation of those born abroad has decreased towards the end of the period examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• crime trends
• gender
• immigrant background

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For those born in 2001 and 2002, we use information on family income when the individuals were aged 13–15 and 12–14 respectively.

2. Still, the rates of all three foreign background groups deviate significantly from that of natives from the mid-1980s to around 2005, whereafter the deviation of Western immigrants is no longer statistically significant (95% c.i.; not shown).

3. One reason for these disparities is that there is a built-in lag in the cohort analyses, since the cohort figures are accumulated over 10 years. If we, for example, would update the analyses in a couple of years we would probably see how the second generation would pass the accumulated levels of the 1st generation in the same manner as we see in figure 1a–b.

4. The lower risk for immigrants is statistically significant at the 5%-level in the three youngest cohort groups (not shown).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2015-01201].