Urban Place of Residence and Individual Criminality

This paper presents a study aimed at determining whether young males who have resided for a long period of time in the same part of Greater Stockholm have been influenced in their criminality by their spatial location. Findings of cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of register data for a birth cohort indicate that location has had practically no long or short-term influence on criminality. Spatial variation in crime within cities has been studied using residential areas as sta-tistical units and aggregated data on the population of each area as the basis for con-structing variables. There is considerable research available on this topic showing that rates of criminality of different types vary between residential areas and that there are strong relationships between crime rates and other social factors. There has not, how-ever, been as much interest in research on the possible relationship on the individual level between the area of residence and the incidence of criminal behaviour. The pre-sent study elucidates this relationship for young males who have resided in the same areas of metropolitan Stockholm over a long period of time. Reasons for a Statistical Relationship A statistical relationship between urban area of residence and individual criminality