ESC European Criminology Award 2024: Per-Olof Wikström

Per-Olof H. Wikström was awarded the 2024 ESC European Criminology Award in recognition of his lifetime contribution to European Criminology. Per-Olof H. Wikström (PhD, Docent, Stockholm University), FBA, is an Emeritus Professor of Ecological and Developmental Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and (currently) Professor of Criminology at Malmö University. He is a Principal Investigator of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), a major ESRC
funded research project which aims to advance knowledge about crime causation and prevention. Professor Wikström’s main research interests are developing unified theory of the causes of crime (Situational Action Theory), its empirical testing and its application to devising knowledge-based prevention policies. He has received numerous scientific accolades: (1) 1992 he was elected Northern Scholar by the University of Edinburgh, (2) in 1994 he received the Sellin-Glueck Award for outstanding contributions to international Criminology from the American Society of Criminology, (3) in 2002 he was made a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, (4) in 2010 he was made a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, (5) in 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, (6) in 2013 he was given an Award of Excellence, University of Maribor (Slovenia), (7) in 2016 he was a winner of the 2016 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, (8) in 2017 he received an Honorary Doctorate from UNED, Madrid, (9) in 2024 he was awarded the Beccaria Gold Medal by the criminological society of German speaking countries for “exceptionally outstanding contributions to the discipline of Criminology” and (10) also in 2024 he received the European Criminology Award.

The Emergence of a Theory

It is a great honour to receive the European Society of Criminology life-time achievement award. My sincere thanks to all those who nominated me, and to the award committee who took the decision to grant me this prestigious distinction. Beate Völker’s exquisite and generous laudation contributed to making this a memorable occasion. I see this award not only as a recognition of my work but also of the work of those that have contributed to or inspired my research over the years. I would also like to express my great appreciation for the support and inspiration I get from my partner in life Suzanna and our family.

I am particularly delighted to receive this award since I was one among a small group of people who took the initiative to set up the European Society of Criminology (ESC). I remember, some time in the early 1990s, sitting in the kitchen of The Swedish National Crime Prevention Council (my then employer) with Josine Junger-Tas discussing why there was no European association of criminologists, noting that many 100s of Europeans every year went to the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), concluding that there should be a scope for a European society. We agreed that establishing a European Society would be an important project worth promoting. This is not the place to review the process and events that led up to the ESC’s constitution. It suffices to mention that the organisationally skilful Michael Tonry (then director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology), who I recall responded quite enthusiastically to the idea, became pivotal, together with a group of prominent European scholars - notably Josine Junger-Tas and Martin Killias - in the work of setting up and organising the ESC. Participating in this project’s realisation, attending the kick-off meeting held in the Netherlands at the WODC in April 2000, and subsequently being a member of the ESC’s first executive board, was an exciting and gratifying experience.

The acceptance speech of a life-time achievement award naturally provides me with an opportunity to reflect on the content of my academic life and how it has unfolded. It also gives me an opportunity to acknowledge some of the many people that I have directly learned from, worked with, and been inspired by at various stages of my career. The creation of Situational Action Theory (SAT) and the design of the longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), testing some of the core propositions of SAT, are probably my
major academic achievements. I shall focus on the emergence of SAT (and the design of PADS+) and briefly review how they are grounded in and grow out of my various research experiences, identifying limitations with dominant people-oriented and place-oriented research traditions and the need for the integration of their key insights to advance knowledge about crime and its causes. Crucially, I shall say something about how I gradually came to realise that providing explanation (answering why and how questions) - the importance of developing strong theory and its empirical testing - is the prime task and goal of Criminology (as a science) and a necessary foundation for the successful creation of a comprehensive and effective crime prevention policy and practise (something that unfortunately is rather lacking).

The crime event

My initial interest as a young PhD student at the University of Stockholm was in the crime event, especially the violent crime event. This interest was founded in my experiences growing up in a ‘problem neighbourhood’ in a city somewhat exaggeratedly referred to at the time in the national media as ‘the Chicago of Sweden’ because of its violence problems. During the late 1970s and early 1980s I conducted several large-scale studies of police recorded violent crimes, which included spending an endless amount of time in archives in dusty basements of police stations up and down Sweden, personally going through and coding nearly 7000 case files comprising crime descriptions; offender, victim and witness statements; and crime scene investigation reports. The analyses of these data focused on classifying violent events by their circumstance, including place and time of occurrence, offender
and victim demographic characteristics, victim- offender relationships, and type of violence used
and injuries. The main findings from this research are presented as a core part of my PhD thesis (Wikström, 1985). Analysing the content of the crime event is an important aspect of the study of crime because explaining the causes of crime is ultimately a question of explaining the causes of the crime event. Knowledge about its characteristics helps guide the search for what factors may be reasonably implicated in its causation.

This research was partly inspired by the work on violence by Derick McClintock (1963), who I later was introduced to by my thesis supervisor Knut Sveri at a meeting of the European Council. This encounter eventually led us to conduct a comparative study of violence in Sweden and Scotland, with a special focus on Stockholm and Edinburgh (McClintock & Wikström; 1990; 1992). Despite often staying in a damp room at the Edinburgh University staff club, as a young scholar it was quite exciting and stimulating to visit, work and socialise with such a prominent senior UK scholar as Derick, and to meet some of the department’s highly talented PhD students, including a very impressive young David Garland. I learnt a lot of useful things from Derick about the ins and outs of the criminological enterprise and spent interesting times with him exploring crime hot spots in Edinburgh, including visiting different kinds of seedy pubs and  clubs, prostitution areas and cannabis-smoke filled flats where drug-dealing took place. He even took me to Glasgow to visit the then infamous Easterhouse estate. Having some knowledge and feel for a city’s criminogenic environments is very useful when doing studies of urban crime (but sometimes risky as I myself experienced being robbed at knifepoint in Chicago when walking around exploring some of its high crime neighbourhoods).

The social ecology of crime

My interest in the violent crime event gradually extended to an interest in crime events more generally and parallelled an interest in the social ecology of crime, for example, exploring spatial and temporal variation of crime events in urban areas, typically but not exclusively at the neighbourhood- level, and their social and economic correlates, the association and overlap between offender, victim and crime geographical distributions in the urban environment, and topics of crime and distance (see e.g., Wikström, 1991). Later research in this area – during my stints as head of the research department of the National Crime Prevention Council in Sweden and subsequently working at the research unit of the Swedish National Police college - included moving away from police records to conducting large-scale surveys allowing the creation and use of instruments more apt at addressing key explanatory ecological research questions, such as those relating to integration and cohesion (e.g., Wikström, Torstensson & Dolmen, 1997; Wikström & Dolmen, 2001). This research was predominantly guided by social disorganisation (collective efficacy) theory, occasionally combined with some routine activity theory, two theoretical orientations that, in later works, I have referred to as ‘a Criminology without people’, because they provide only partial, albeit important, knowledge relevant to the explanation of crime events. Ecological research into crime is generally, but not exclusively, carried out at the aggregate level. One main problem when analysing aggregate data, e.g., neighbourhood level data, predicting crime rates is that there typically is a huge within-group variation (e.g., within-neighbourhood variation) in people’s crime involvement that remains unexplained; another and related problem is the difficulty of asserting causal relationships at the aggregate level.

The major scholar and flag bearer of the Chicago school ecological tradition is undoubtedly Robert Sampson, who I got to know early in his career (long before his scholarly fame) when he was at the University of Urbana-Champaigne. I was pointed in his direction by Albert Reiss Jr. at a meeting of the ASC; he prompted me to contact Rob saying that there is this American guy that has similar research interest to you, so you should really get in touch. Which I did, and subsequently we became friends and later collaborated on a couple of book chapters and edited a few books together (e.g. Sampson & Wikström, 2008; Wikström & Sampson, 2003; 2006). A distinct memory from our first meeting (1986) was that I stayed in a Holiday Inn full of cockroaches and that Rob had a very cool bright red convertible Pontiac with white leather seats. Our shared interest in the role of the social and moral context of the environment in crime causation has over the years resulted in many stimulating exchanges and Rob’s work on collective efficacy and ecometrics have been important inspirations to our research on the criminogeneity of the setting.

While the study of the characteristics of the crime event and its social ecology provides important
clues to understanding the role of the immediate circumstances and the features of the wider environments in which crime events occur, there is something central missing. It does not say much about why there is individual variation in how people react and respond to specific environmental conditions and the implications of this for their crime involvement. At the end of the day, it is people who commit acts of crime; it is their specific reactions and responses to particular environmental conditions that determine whether or not an act of crime will occur. A complete explanation of the criminogenic role of the environment requires an understanding
of how (through what mechanisms) environmental inducements situationally affect people’s criminal action choices and developmentally affect stability and changes in their crime propensities and exposure to criminogenic settings. I have argued that a true ecology of crime should focus on the role of the person-environment interaction.

Developmental Criminology

Although I did my PhD in Criminology, my PhD training was primarily at the Sociology Department. Criminology did not at the time offer a PhD training program. It was a relatively new degree subject and did not become a separate department until 1987. The Sociology Department provided strong statistical/ methodological training and gave in-depth courses on central sociological and social psychological theories (not textbook summaries). Reading and analysing the arguments in the original works of classic theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead and Cooley certainly fuelled my interest in theory. The Sociology Department was headed by the imposing and demanding Carl-Gunnar Janson, from whom I learned a lot on the craft of doing good research, although I did not always follow his advice in all aspects. I remember presenting a paper on different assumptions of human nature at a PhD seminar, to which Carl-Gunnar commented, “I read philosophy in my spare time”. Despite this put off
I have over the years developed a keen interest in issues of the philosophical underpinnings of theorising and doing empirical research, relating to such issues as scientific realism, causation and explanation, and agency and action theory.

Carl-Gunnar’s largest empirical project was the Project Metropolitan, a longitudinal study of about 15000 people born in Stockholm in 1953, which provided me with an opportunity to progress my newfound interest in the role of individual differences and their development, doing research on individuals’ criminal careers, covering topics like sex, age and social class diversities in crime involvement, crime structure, age at onset, duration, desistance, versatility and specialisation (e.g. Wikström, 1987; 1990). This interest successively brought me in contact with a different ‘tribe’ of scholars and their body of research (the developmental criminologists), more often psychologists than sociologists. The first major figure in this field I got to know was the impressive David Farrington, the nestor of Developmental Criminology, who wrote a very generous book review of my PhD thesis, which led me to contact and then visit him in Cambridge. We subsequently came to collaborate on some different projects, including a comparative study of Criminal Careers in London and Stockholm (Farrington & Wikström, 1993). I particularly remember when David came to Stockholm for us to work on this particular paper and I planned to take him from the airport to his hotel, but David insisted we should go directly to my office and start working, which we did. David had an immense, almost encyclopaedic, knowledge of offender-oriented and developmental criminological research. There are few topics and problems in this area of study to which he has not contributed.
I certainly learned a lot by working and socialising with David. I will always cherish our pub dinners and illuminating conversations on the intricacies of doing longitudinal research and its various challenges.

Rolf Loeber was another giant of Developmental Criminology I was privileged to get to know. Socialising and working with Rolf had a profound influence on my own research; particularly, I learned a lot from Rolf and Magda Loeber about how to professionally organise and manage successful longitudinal research. In fact, the Pittsburgh Youth Study (at this time, undoubtedly the best organised and run longitudinal study into crime) became the template for the organisation and management of the PADS+ study. Rolf was always interested in discussing new ideas and finding ways to improve his research, so when I suggested adding an ecological dimension to his study he wholeheartedly embraced it and let me get on with analysing the neighbourhood structure of Pittsburgh, adding this to his data set. This allowed us to collaborate on some papers exploring pathways in crime in different neighbourhood contexts (Loeber & Wikström, 1997) and how neighbourhood socioeconomic context and individual characteristics (individual dispositions and social situation) predicted prevalence and early and late onsets in serious male juvenile offending (Wikström & Loeber, 2000). Studying development in context is a step closer to integrating developmental and social ecological aspects in the study of crime. However, there is still something essential missing. It does not say much about what moves people to commit acts of crime, the necessary glue that would help pinpoint and bring together key insights from people and place focused approaches in criminological study.

Developmental Criminology unquestionably harbours a lot of important knowledge about individual differences and patterns of change in  crime involvement. However, it is typically, but not exclusively, guided by a public health approach, focusing on mapping out risk and protective factors, principally statistically significant but often rather weak predictors of which hundreds have been identified, in many cases with unclear causal relevance. I have argued that the main challenge with this approach is to identify which few of all the many predictors are causally important, and that the way to do this is to ask what moves people to action (to commit acts of crime) and from that starting point seek to identify which key personal and environmental factors are directly (as causes) or indirectly (as causes of the causes) effective in this process. To accomplish this requires an adequate action theory.

Making theoretical sense of it all – the importance of action theory

Becoming a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in 2002 was a turning-point for my scholarly work, providing me with uninterrupted time to develop my theoretical interests, digging into the extensive literature on action theory and the problem of causation and explanation, laying the groundwork for the development of SAT, my attempt to make theoretical sense of it all. Up to this point I had primarily worked on trying to integrate certain key concepts from some mainstream criminological theories but gradually realised that this was a rather futile enterprise. It quickly turned into prediction rather than explanation. The difficulty of conceptual unification and the black-box problem were significant. The glue was missing and the pieces to be glued together did not fit very well. To overcome this, a different approach to integration seemed necessary. I formulated two basic questions to direct my work. The first question was (a) why people come to see and choose crime as an acceptable action alternative in the circumstance; the second question was (b) what personal characteristics and environmental features are causally relevant and interact in this process. Addressing these questions became the focal point of my research at CASBS, observing that explaining people’s acts of crime is not that much different from explaining what guides their actions in general.

Socialising with other fellows at CASBS, first-rate scholars from a wide range of different social and behavioural science disciplines, attending their seminar presentations, enjoying free access to coffee (very important to me) and joint lunches ‘on the hill’, created an extremely stimulating work environment, especially considering my cross-disciplinary interests. For example, my next-door neighbour at the centre, a very astute philosopher, directed me to some very useful central action-theoretical philosophical studies she thought was relevant to my work after having heard my seminar presentation outlining my ideas on the explanation of crime events. An important chance event, while browsing the books in the Stanford University bookstore, was coming across Mario Bunge’s book ‘The Sociology-Philosophy Connection’ (1999). Having read and been impressed by this and other books by him I contacted Mario and eventually we met up in Montreal where he was working at the McGill University. Mario Bunge is the most remarkable scholar I ever have personally met and his approach to science has had a strong influence on my attitude to theory and its empirical testing. We became friendly and I invited him to a workshop in Cambridge to which he contributed a talk and a book- chapter (Bunge, 2006). Later we kept corresponding by email, and he had the kindness to read and comment on some of my initial draft writings on topics of causation and explanation in the study of crime; getting the thumbs up from him in these matters was very satisfying and reassuring. Our contact also made me aware of his neuroscientist daughter Silvia Bunge and her colleagues’ important works on human rule-guidance. My time at CASBS was a very industrious and stimulating time and the kind of time one wishes for talented younger colleagues to have more of to allow them to develop their thinking, not being caught up in the increasingly strong publish or perish cycle, being judged primarily by the numbers of publications and citations rather than by the content of their work. A comment made that has stuck in my mind is that many of the historically great scholars from Cambridge would have struggled to get tenure in the current publish or perish climate (although Cambridge is probably a bit better on this front than many other universities).

The Cambridge years – SAT and its testing in PADS+.

While I spent the first half of my academic life in Sweden, the last 27 years I have had my base at
the University of Cambridge, the last 2 years as an Emeritus Professor after my retirement in 2022. I had no presentiment that I would end up in Cambridge. I unexpectedly got a call from Tony Bottoms, the
then Director of the Cambridge Institute, asking me if I was interested in applying for a job in Cambridge, which I did and got, a decision I never have regretted. Tony helpfully introduced me to the peculiarities of Cambridge University and expertly familiarised me with the delights of the Indian cuisine which has become a favourite food of mine. An attempt he made to explain cricket to me was less successful. Tony is a truly inspiring intellectual in the classic sense. Over the years we have had many stimulating discussions, initially sharing an interest in social theory and more recently in the topic of crime and morality. Incidentally, his early work on the ecology of crime – the 1976 study ‘The Urban Criminal’ - was one key inspiration in my own research into the social ecology of crime.

At Cambridge things started to properly come together. After my stint at CASBS, I completed the writing up
of SAT, resulting in three book chapters laying out the foundation and initial situational framework of SAT and its early application to developmental study (Wikström, 2004; 2005; 2006). The theory was subsequently elaborated and refined (e.g., Wikström, 2010; Wikström & Treiber, 2016), and its neuropsychological foundation strengthened (Treiber, 2011), but the fundamental propositions and principles remain the same. I present the most updated and refined version of SAT in chapter 2 of our new book: “Character, Circumstances and Criminal Careers” (Wikström, Treiber & Roman, 2024), a chapter in which I also compare and contrast SAT with some prominent mainstream criminological theories (social bonds, self-control and differential association), and discuss it in relation to rational choice theory and the idea of moral disengagement. In another work, Kyle Treiber and I have compared and contrasted SAT with Routine Activity Theory (Wikström & Treiber, 2015).

While at the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, in the first half of the 1990s, my interest in knowledge integration led me to organise two international workshops, bringing together world- leading criminological scholars to present on and discuss the problems and prospects of integrating individual and environmental aspects on crime and crime prevention (Farrington, Sampson & Wikström, 1993; Wikström, Clarke & McCord, 1995). These workshops became the precursors to my development in Cambridge of the ESRC sponsored research network Social Contexts of Pathways in Crime (SCoPiC). This is not the place to review all the activities of the SCoPiC network; suffice it to say that an aim of the network was to contribute to cross-level integrative research and that this came to include the initial funding for PADS+. Although I designed PADS+ to cover the kind of individual dispositional, family, school and peer instruments commonly used in crime-focused longitudinal research, a unique feature of the study is its environmental measures (later partly copied in the Dutch SPAN study and the Swedish MINDS study). To better measure people’s environmental exposure and its changes over time, a space-time budget and a separate city-wide small-area community survey were included to jointly measure participants’ specific exposure to settings and their characteristics within and outside their neighbourhood. This enabled a more detailed study of the role of the person-environment interaction in crime causation and its changes over time. This was necessary for testing some key propositions of SAT, for example, to cross-sectionally test whether hypothesised criminogenic person-environment interactions predicted crime involvement, and longitudinally to test whether changes in people’s crime propensity and criminogenic exposure matched changes in their crime involvement in ways predicted by the theory. The empirical findings so far from the PADS+ research are published in two major books (Wikström, Oberwittler, Treiber & Hardie, 2012; Wikström, Treiber & Roman, 2024) and a number of journal papers (e.g., Wikström & Treiber, 2016; Wikström, Mann & Hardie, 2018).

Doing longitudinal research is not a one-person enterprise. I have been fortunate to work closely with a fantastic group of researchers in the PADS+ project, notably the highly talented Kyle Treiber, Beth Hardie and Gabriela Roman (Kyle and Beth making their PhD theses on PADS+ data), who all have played central roles at various stages of the research, bringing their own various skills and expertise to the study and analyses of its data, and now constituting the core team, ‘the three musketeers’, taking on the next wave of data collection, now under Kyle’s leadership. It is satisfying to know that the future of PADS+ is in safe and competent hands. The study has over the years also benefitted from contributions by Dietrich Oberwittler and Vania Ceccato, while being visitors to the Cambridge Institute.

So, what have I learned? That empirical research is important, but that theory is crucial to guide empirical work and make sense of empirical findings. That there needs to be a balance between theoretical and empirical work to avoid, in the words of Mario Bunge, “mindless data-gathering as well as wild speculation” (1999:11). That the ultimate goal of science is to provide explanations (answering why and how questions) that help us understand how things work and, if we so wish, can be influenced. The emergence of SAT may be seen as an initial attempt to explain why crime events happen and how this works (i.e., the central situational, social and developmental processes involved in its causation), an example of an Analytic Criminology approach to the study of crime (see Wikström & Kroneberg, 2022).

So, what does the future hold? I hope to continue being involved in PADS+ research (Kyle allowing me to) and I shall certainly work on further developments and refinements of SAT. The social mechanisms of the meso-macro link is one area that needs further work. There are also many applications of SAT to particular problems that require extra attention, such as the explanation of victimisation. Testing the situational mechanism - the perception-choice process - proposed by SAT would benefit from more experimental research, covering different crime circumstances. The role of genetics needs to be explored and its role within the theory specified (which I believe is in Kyle’s pipeline - PADS+ has already collected as yet unanalysed genetics data from the participants). The implications
of SAT for guiding the development of proactive and reactive crime prevention policy and practice needs detailed specification. Two ongoing projects that will occupy my time in the near future are a study financed by the Swedish Research Council, applying SAT into the problem of violence and its prevention, a collaboration between the universities in Malmö, Cologne and Cambridge, and the writing of a textbook on crime and its prevention in Swedish, together with my longstanding colleague and close friend Marie Torstensson (she is also taking part in the violence project). So, I will probably keep busy.

References

Bunge, M. (1999). The sociology-philosophy connection. Transaction.

Bunge, M. (2006). A systemic perspective on crime. In Wikström, P-O. & Sampson, Robert. J. (Eds.) The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms and development (pp. 8-30). Cambridge University Press.

Farrington, D. P. & Wikström, P-O. (1993). Criminal careers in London and Stockholm: A cross-national comparative study. In Weitekamp, E. & Kerner, H-J. (Eds.), Cross national and longitudinal research on human development and criminal behavior (pp. 65-89). Kluwer.

Farrington, D. P., Sampson, R. J. & Wikström, P-O. (1993). Integrating individual and ecological aspects of crime. Fritzes.

Loeber, R. & Wikström, P-O. (1993). Individual pathways to crime in different types of neighborhoods. In Farrington, D. P., Sampson, R. J., & Wikström, P-O. (Eds.), Integrating individual and ecological aspects of crime. Fritzes.

McClintock, F. H. (1963). Crimes of violence. Macmillan.

McClintock, F. H. & Wikström, P-O. (1990). Violent crime in Scotland and Sweden: Rate, structure, and trends. The British Journal of Criminology, 30, 207–228.

McClintock, F. H. & Wikström, P-O. (1992). The comparative study of urban violence: Criminal violence in Edinburgh and Stockholm. The British Journal of Criminology, 32, 505–520.

Sampson, R. J. & Wikström, P-O. (2008). The social order of violence in Chicago and Stockholm neighbourhoods. A comparative inquiry. In Shapiro, I. & Kalyvas, S. (Eds.), Order, conflict and violence. Cambridge University Press.

Treiber, K. (2011). The neuroscientific basis of situational action theory. In Beaver, K. & Walsh, A. (Eds.), The Ashgate research companion on biosocial theories of crime. Routledge.

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Wikström, P-O. (1991). Urban crime, criminals and victims. Springer Verlag.

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Wikström, P-O. (2006). Individuals, settings and acts of crime: Situational mechanisms and the explanation of crime. In Wikström, P-O. & Sampson, R. J. (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms and development (pp. 61-107). Cambridge University Press.

Wikström, P-O. (2010). Explaining crime as moral action. In Hitlin, S. & Vaysey, S. (Eds.) Handbook of the sociology of morality. Springer Verlag.

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Wikström, P-O. & Kroneberg, C. (2022). Analytic criminology. Mechanisms and methods in the explanation of crime and its causes. Annual Review of Criminology, 5, 179-203.

Wikström, P-O. & Loeber, R. (2000). Do disadvantaged neighborhoods cause well-adjusted children to become adolescent delinquents? Criminology, 38, 1109-1142.

Wikström, P-O. & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Social mechanisms of community influences in crime and pathways in criminality. In Lahey, B. B., Moffitt, T. E., & Caspi, A. (Eds.), The causes of conduct disorder and serious juvenile delinquency (pp. 108-148). Guilford Press.

Wikström, P-O. & Sampson, R. J. (2006). The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms and development. Cambridge University Press.

Wikström, P-O. & Treiber, K. (2015). Situational theory: The importance of interactions and action mechanisms. In Piquero, A. (Ed.), The handbook of criminological theory. Wiley Blackwell.

Wikström, P-O. & Treiber, K. (2016). Social disadvantage and crime: A criminological puzzle. American Behavioral Scientist, 60, 8.

Wikström, P-O. & Treiber, K. (2018). The dynamics of change: Criminogenic interactions and life-course patterns of crime. In Farrington, D. P., Kazemian, L., & Piquero, A. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of developmental and life-course criminology (pp. 272- 294). Oxford University Press.

Wikström, P-O., Clarke, R. V. G., and McCord, J. (1995). Integrating crime prevention strategies: Propensity and opportunity. Fritzes.

Wikström, P-O., Mann, R. & Hardie, B. (2018). Young people’s differential vulnerability to criminogenic exposure: Bridging the gap between people- and place-oriented approaches in the study of crime causation. European Journal of Criminology, 15, 10-31.

Wikström, P-O., Oberwittler, D., Treiber, K., & Hardie, B. (2012). Breaking rules: The social and situational dynamics of young people’s urban crime. Oxford University Press.

Wikström, P-O., Torstensson, M., & Dolmén, L. (1997). Lokala problem, brott och trygghet. Solna.

Wikström, P-O., Treiber, K., & Roman, G. (2024). Character, circumstances and criminal careers: Towards a dynamic developmental and life-course criminology. Oxford University Press.