Long-term outcomes of alternative sanctions for youths in conflict with the law: the influence of individual resources and social context

Penal responses to criminal behaviour among youths are issues frequently put in the limelight.

Yet, research on the most common sanctions imposed on this group is relatively scarce, and existing research is unproportionally focused on custodial sanctions.

The proposed project aims to fill this gap by outlining the use of alternative sanctions for first-time young offenders (15-17- and 18-20-yearolds) in detail and assess their differential links to recidivism risk and future education and labour market attachment.

The project further aims to explore if family resources, the historical context as well as the spatial context in which sanctions are served moderate these associations.The proposed project will utilize Swedish register data and will be able to follow 25 successive birth cohorts (born 1975–2000) from the time of their first criminal conviction and for up to 30-years.

These data also allow adjustment for a broad set of background factors by merging conviction data with a number of other registers. The large national longitudinal data also make it possible to perform gender-stratified analyses.

The project will run for four years and could produce knowledge of relevance for both policy and practice, for example in terms of weighing between principles of proportionality and culpability and principles of safeguarding youths’ wellbeing and developmental opportunities.