Before and After Crime: Life-Course Analyses of Young Offenders Arrested in Nineteenth-Century Northern Sweden

This essay combines prison records with parish registers to employ life-course perspectives on past offenders and expand the view of them. The results show highly unusual criminal and demographic data that indicate the life experiences of 320 offenders in Sweden before and after they had committed their crime in 1840-1880. Paupers did not dominate among them, and due to their evident local background most offenders had access to parental ties. In providing informal control such socio-geographical features are believed to limit people's criminal involvement, but this was not so for these individuals. As the parish registers under study are digitized by the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, they allow event-history analyses. Examining four demographic events (relocation, marriage, career and death) helps to statistically distinguish and differentiate the stigma that afflicts offenders upon release according to some labeling theories. The trajectories of most male offenders suggest that they established social bonds to the surrounding people and society, probably because they were not markedly stigmatized but were faced with tolerant attitudes. It seems as if similar attitudes did not include the thieves and the few female criminals, however, as narrow marital and survival chances characterized their life after crime.