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While it is known that a large proportion of crime is committed by small number of persistent offenders, the proportion of individuals with criminal convictions in the Nordic populations have also been estimated to be surprisingly high (Sivertsson et al., 2019; Skardhamar 2014). In Finland, 1,5-2% of men born between 1980 and 1988 were imprisoned before the age of 30, the proportion being lower in the younger birth cohorts (Aaltonen & Pitkänen, 2022). Yet, the extent of individuals receiving non-custodial sentences has rarely been studied. Our article (currently in preparation) seeks to address this gap in knowledge. In this blog post, I present some of the tentative results.
Our analyses are based on population-wide register data from various administrative sources, including complete records of criminal convictions given in district courts. These register datasets were linked with a personal identification code to construct datasets of both men and women born in 1980-1990, with a follow-up to age 30. We identified the first sentence type of each kind (court-ordered fine, conditional imprisonment, community service and unconditional imprisonment) for every individual and ran logistic panel regressions with marginal effects to estimate the rates of sentence types imposed on individuals in forementioned birth cohorts.
Before the age of 30, 22.8% of men had received at least one conviction in district court. Court-ordered fines were the most common sentence type, imposed on 19.6% of men. One-tenth of men (9.6%) were sentenced to conditional imprisonment, with community service and unconditional imprisonment showing substantially smaller rates (1.7% and 1.6%, respectively). As expected, women show much lower rates of criminal convictions compared to men: 5.8% of women had received any kind of criminal conviction in district courts before the age of 30. Five percent were sentenced to a court-ordered fine, while conditional imprisonment was imposed on 1.8% of women. Imprisonment (0.2%) and community service (0.2%) were also significantly more uncommon among women. The analyses suggest that rates of conviction in Finland are somewhat similar to Sweden (Sivertsson et al., 2019), while Norway’s rates have been estimated to be smaller (Skardhamar 2014).
The offences leading to non-custodial sentences are mostly traffic crimes, with endangering traffic safety and DUI and their aggravated forms being the most common offences. While there is a noticeable overlap in the convictions (persons receiving the stricter sanctions have typically also received the lesser sanctions), being convicted in district court is relatively common, as more than one fifth of men received a criminal conviction before the age of 30. In future analyses, we will explore the official crime careers leading to different sentence types in more detail.
Aaltonen, M., & Pitkänen, J. (2022). Vankeuteen tuomitaan yhä pienempi osa syntymäkohortista. Haaste, 22(4). https://rikoksentorjunta.fi/-/haaste-4-22-vankeuteen-tuomitaan-yha-pienempi-osa-syntymakohortista
Sivertsson, F., Nilsson, A., & Bäckman, O. (2021). Participation and Frequency in Criminal Convictions across 25 Successive Birth Cohorts: Collectivity, Polarization, or Convergence? Justice Quarterly, 38(6), 995–1018. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2019.1699941
Skardhamar, T. (2014). Lifetime conviction risk-a synthetic cohort approach. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 15(1), 96–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14043858.2014.883175
Author bio:
Aaro Beuker is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy (University of Helsinki).
aaro.beuker@helsinki.fi
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/aaro-beuker