Hanns von Hofer was born in 1944 in Germany. His father died in the war and Hanns grew up with a single mother and three older sisters. He studied law at universities in Berlin, Göttingen, Lausanne and Munich. A scholarship for studying criminology took him to Sweden. He was an assistant at the Department of Criminology at Stockholm University, worked at the Department of Judicial Statistics at Statistics Sweden, returned to Stockholm University and there became a professor of criminology in 1999.
Hanns devoted his professional life to criminal statistics and imprisonment. He analysed the breakthrough of imprisonment in Sweden before Foucault was translated from French. He creatively developed Swedish criminal statistics, was the primary force behind Nordic Criminal Statistics and was one of the initiators of the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics.
It could be said that Hanns restored criminal statistics, which had partly fallen into disrepute after attacks from constructivists and put off as administrative statistics, to the science of criminology. He was the first to recognise the problems; but, by using long series of criminal statistics and a comparative approach, he could use the statistics as real indicators of crime and thereby test criminological theories. Together with his colleagues, he developed cohort statistics and could thereby make early predictions of the stagnation and even decline in crime that was long questioned in Sweden. Indeed, an article by Hanns, representing the cohort forecast approach, appears in this issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention.
Central in Hanns' analyses was the testing of the effects of criminal sanctions in general and imprisonment in particular. In one of his last analyses, presented at Beijing Normal University, he used historic Nordic criminal statistics to denounce the crime-preventing effects of the death penalty – thereby through his approach and methodology reaching the opposite conclusion to that of celebrated Chicago economists. Through historic statistics, he also falsified the claims of the general deterrent effects of prison. This and other analyses in his Brott och straff i Sverige (Crime and Punishment in Sweden, which he unfortunately did not translate into English) will remain a central work for coming generations of Nordic criminologists.
Hanns' belief in criminal statistics also stemmed from what he regarded as the democratic character of official statistics. In contrast to the spectacular presentations of crime in media, national criminal statistics would give each citizen the same weight, like the “one (wo)man, one vote” principle in general elections. In contrast to many critical social scientists who regard official statistics as an instrument for governance, he would stress it as a tool of citizens for democratic control, as it was seen in the era of the breakthrough of democracy. And, with official statistics, Hanns could demonstrate that penal repression could be further restricted, thereby improving democratic society.
The importance of the work of Hanns von Hofer will, in the years to come, probably be increasingly recognised. His premature death is a loss not only to friends and colleagues but also to criminology.
Henrik Tham
Professor, JSSCCP Advisory Board Member