Illuminating the Labeling Impact of Incarceration: Life-Course Perspectives of Young Offenders’ Pathways in Comparison to Non-Offenders in Nineteenth-Century Northern Sweden

• Published in: Crime, Histoire & Sociétés
• Main Author: Vikström, Lotta
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: Librairie Droz 2011
• Subjects: droit; hist; Northern Sweden; Suède du Nord
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/361

In history, little is known about what happened to past offenders upon release. The labeling theories propose that the label bore negative consequences for those defined as criminals. To find evidence of this, young offenders’ life courses after incarceration in a booming sawmill area in nineteenth-century northern Sweden are examined. Prison registers are investigated and linked to Swedish parish records digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB), Umeå University. These historical sources allow for life-course perspectives that have been recently developed in modern criminology and other fields. Event-history analyses of a matched data set including non-criminals help to detect whether offenders suffered markedly from their criminal label, through examining four demographic events: relocation, marriage, career and death. Achieving this label had some negative impact on the pathways of individuals, but it was not equal to crisis and did not change the course of life dramatically. However, criminal men were less successful on the labor market and the few female offenders appear to be most vulnerable because this label meant they especially transgressed their gendered expectations. Nevertheless, finding that incarceration did not ruin the future prospects of young people challenges the stigma emphasized by some labeling concepts. It seems as if offenders confronted social exclusion to a limited extent and were governed by tolerant attitudes and a prosperous labor market. Historiquement, on sait peu de choses du sort des condamnés après leur libération. La théorie de l’étiquetage suggère que ceux qui ont été définis comme criminels subissent les conséquences négatives de cette étiquette. Pour le vérifier, le présent article se penche sur l’existence de jeunes délinquants après leur emprisonnement, dans une zone de la Suède du nord connaissant une très forte expansion de l’industrie forestière au XIXe siècle. On a dépouillé les registres des prisons et on les a croisés avec les registres paroissiaux numérisés ...