Mikko Aaltonen

This study examines officially recorded offending trajectories leading to different types of criminal sanctions in the Finnish justice system. We focus on the most common sanctions in terms of quantity, with emphasis on suspended imprisonment, community service, and imprisonment. The choice of sanction type is not solely based on the severity of the crime committed, but also on the offender’s criminal history and assessed capability to comply with the requirements of non-custodial sanctions. Individual sentences and their justifications are always the result of judges’ discretion, but a large-scale analysis of the sanction trajectories and recorded offenses preceding different sanction types provides important information about the functioning of the criminal justice system. By using detailed, whole population register data from birth cohorts 1980–1990 ( N = 714,607), we analyze recorded offending trajectories preceding the offenders’ first sanction type of each kind, that is, the entry to different stages of the punishment ladder. The results show that while first suspended imprisonments are not preceded by extensive criminal histories, they are rarely the first criminal justice contact. Individuals sentenced to community service or imprisonment for the first time have accumulated a large number of prior criminal convictions and crimes before receiving these sanction types, with a median of 9 and 13 prior sanctions, respectively.

Background and ObjectivesEarly-onset dementia (EOD), affecting individuals younger than 65 years, imposes a substantial socioeconomic burden. However, evidence on long-term income trajectories and ...

Early-life adversities contribute to adolescent criminal behavior, but whether such adversities are linked only to specific crime types remains unclear. Drawing from a developmental and life-course criminology perspective and the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) framework, this study compared the effects of early-life adversities on youth criminal behavior across different crimes. Using the register data of Finnish children born between 1987 and 2000 ( N = 835,512), a series of negative binomial regression analyses were conducted to study the associations between adversities experienced during childhood (0–14 years) and involvement in crimes during adolescence (15–20 years). The crimes studied included violent crimes, frauds, other property crimes, driving under the influence, traffic crimes, sexual offenses, drug-related offenses, and vandalism. Our findings suggest that ACEs—as measured by parental hospitalization due to substance abuse or mental health problems, parental conviction for a violent crime, parental death, parental unemployment, and parental receipt of social assistance—are linked to all types of criminal behavior instead of specific offenses, with parental violence and parental receipt of social assistance having the strongest associations. The accumulation of ACEs, we found, increased the likelihood of committing each of the studied crimes. Our findings demonstrate how ACEs can disrupt a child’s development in ways that are associated with a broad range of criminal behavior later in life and how crime distribution mirrors socioeconomic disparities. Additionally, our findings highlight the importance of trauma-informed interventions and general crime prevention strategies in addressing the long-term effects of early-life adversities on criminal behavior.

Violent victimisation affects 1-4% of populations annually and constitutes a major risk factor for psychiatric morbidity and suicidal behaviours. However, the aetiological mechanisms underlying vulnerability to severe victimisation remain poorly understood. We examined genetic and environmental contributions to victimisation risk across development using nationwide family data from 4,458,368 individuals born in Sweden (1973-2004) and Finland (1970-2003). Violent victimisation was identified through hospital admissions and mortality records. Quantitative genetic models estimated additive genetic, shared environmental, and unique environmental influences across developmental periods, with sex-limitation analyses examining sex-specific effects. Among 154,209 individuals (2.9%) with documented victimisation, familial aggregation was proportional to genetic relatedness (adjusted hazard ratios: 6.0 [95% CI 4.0-9.0] for monozygotic twins; 1.4 [95% CI 1.4-1.5] for paternal half-siblings). Aetiological architecture varied substantially across development. Childhood-onset victimisation showed high heritability (h ² =70%, 95% CI 44-95%) with notable shared environmental contributions (c ² =22%, 95% CI 9-35%). Adolescent-onset and adult-onset victimisation demonstrated lower heritability (h ² =40-44%) with predominant unique environmental effects (e ² =56-60%) and negligible shared environmental influence. Sex-limitation models revealed comparable heritability between sexes but moderate cross-sex genetic correlations (r _g =0.77-0.78), indicating partially distinct genetic pathways. Violent victimisation therefore exhibits a developmentally dynamic genetic architecture, with heritability decreasing and unique environmental contributions increasing from childhood to adulthood. Partially sex-specific genetic pathways underscore the need for age- and sex-stratified genomic investigations.

Youth violence has decreased in many Western countries, including Finland and Sweden, during the 2000s. A worrying deviation from this decline concerns lethal youth violence in the two countries, in particular Sweden, which has experienced a clear increase. In this study, we analyze the extent to which this divergence mirrors a concentration of violence whereby fewer and fewer young people are subject to the criminal justice system, but where those who are, are increasingly high-frequent and/or severe offenders. We employ full population longitudinal register data on Finnish and Swedish birth cohorts born between 1986 and 1998 who are followed with conviction data for violent crimes between ages 15 and 20. We disaggregate the trends across these cohorts into criminal career parameters, break down violent crime into specific violent categories, and scrutinize the trends by sociodemographic background variables that are typically associated with violent crime: sex, foreign background, family income, and urban residence. Our findings show that the overall decline in juvenile violent convictions is primarily driven by a declining proportion of violent offenders. This decline is fairly uniform across the examined background variables in both countries. At the same time, this study gives a less optimistic picture of the development within the convicted population of juvenile violent offenders. Convicted juvenile violent offenders born in the late 1990s offend with the same frequency, have a similar debut age of convicted violent crime, but are recorded for more severe offenses as their same-age counterparts born just a decade earlier. Longitudinal data on multiple birth cohorts are needed to understand whether we are seeing more lasting changes in criminal careers, and how these developments look like in comparative terms.

Objectives: To test the effect of local, industry-specific labour demand on employment and recidivism following a person’s release from a prison in Finland. Methods: This study was an observational study based on administrative data. The data included all working-aged men (N = 33,270) released from prison between 2007 and 2018 in Finland. We analysed the industry of the employers descriptively and studied the effect of labour demand on employment and recidivism rates post-release with a linear probability model. Labour demand was measured by counting new employments that began in the first 30 days post-release in the region the subject resided in at the time of release. Employment and recidivism were analysed with a 6- and 12-month follow-up. Results: Of the study population, 11.1% were employed and 44.7% recidivated in the first 6 months. We found the most common employers to be the construction and manufacturing industries along with temporary work agencies. Our models indicated that the low-skill labour demand in construction increased the likelihood of employment (β = 0.0108, se = 0.0026) but did not reduce the risk of recidivism (β = 0.0030, se = 0.0045). Conclusions: Higher labour demand may not lead to lower recidivism in all contexts. As the effect of labour demand may be driven by specific societal or labour market characteristics, further research should focus on identifying the characteristics that affect recidivism and post-prison employment. As this study may only be generalisable to the Finnish prison population, similar studies are needed from varied contexts.