Crime in adult offspring of prisoners - A cross-national comparison of two longitudinal samples

Studies from several countries suggest that parental criminality is a strong predictor of children's own criminal behavior. Recently, the authors found that parental incarceration predicted boys' delinquency in an English cohort, even after controlling for parental criminality and other childhood risks. The present study uses data from Project Metropolitan (Sweden) on 15,117 children born in the same year as the English cohort (1953) to test whether results in England were replicated in Sweden. In Sweden, parental incarceration predicted children's own criminal behavior, but unlike in England, the effects of parental incarceration disappeared after statistically controlling for the criminality of the parent. This cross-national difference may have been the result of shorter prison sentences in Sweden, more family friendly prison policies, a welfare-oriented juvenile justice system, an extended social welfare system, and more sympathetic public attitudes toward crime and punishment.