Involvement in Crime, Individual Resources and Structural Constraints: Processes of Cumulative (Dis)Advantage in a Stockholm Birth Cohort

In this article, we study how a central welfare outcome, labour market attachment, develops for different groups defined on the basis of their criminal involvement over the life course. Can we see the pattern of increasing inter-group disparities in labour market attachment that would be predicted by cumulative disadvantage theories? If so, is this a result of the criminal history of individuals or should criminal involvement be seen as one element in a negative life trajectory in a more general sense? And what role do circumstances at the structural level play in such a process? The Swedish economic recession of the 1990s and an examination of how a Stockholm cohort entered, lived through and then exited the unemployment crisis provide an opportunity to study how macro events affect different groups of individuals in a specific socio-historical situation. Our results show that both individual resources and historical events at the structural level are important when it comes to describing individual biographies and events in the life course.