Military Conscription and Local Crime

Sammanfattning: The defence bill passed by the Swedish parliament in 2020 instigates a continued expansion of the Swedish Armed Forces and an increase in the number of military conscripts for the coming years. The bill includes an expansion of military conscription, a compulsory enlistment dominated by young men. As young men are most statistically prone to commit violent and property crime, this study sets out to analyse the connection between conscription and crime. Previous research has not found a conclusive connection between military service and future criminal convictions. However, this paper contributes to previous research by analysing the contemporary effect of Swedish conscripts on municipal crime between 1997 and 2008. The dataset forms a panel of 46 Swedish municipalities with at least one male conscript at any time of the studied period. Furthermore, we differentiate between normal municipalities and "base municipalities", i.e., regions with a high conscript-to-population ratio, to analyse if the conscript-effect is higher for some municipalities than others. Our findings indicate that the number of conscripts does not significantly affect regional crime levels, nor is a significant effect found for base municipalities. We conclude that the absence of effects may be due to an incapacitation effect, conscripts not being a representable sample for the population of young men and military culture deterring criminal behaviour.