Compositional and Behavioral Drivers of Declining Conviction Rates

• In Event: The "Big Picture" of Life Course Research: Systematic Reviews, Population Trends, and Cross-National Comparisons

Abstract

Crime rates have been declining in many developed democracies since the early 1990s but we, largely because of data deficiencies, still lack answers to fundamental questions related to this positive development. We use highly detailed and suitable administrative data from Denmark to show that in this context, declining conviction rates among 15-30-year-old men since 1991 were more likely driven by compositional changes than by behavioral changes. In practice, we do so by showing that whereas conviction rates within groups defined from predicted conviction risks remained relatively stable across the 1991-2016 period, the density distribution of young men across the risk groups became gradually more right skewed. We show results for the majority population but also for the subset of men of non-western backgrounds to illustrate our findings’ applicability to a group with notoriously high conviction rates in the 1990s. We conclude that the crime decline could well be driven by a type of sociodemographic sample selection according to which there are simply fewer men in high-risk groups today, and that compositional changes to the population thus could represent a root cause of declining crime rates.

Authors

• Lars Hoejsgaard Andersen, ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit

• Daniel Juhász Vigild, ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit