Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK´s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Probation has offices in every county, and with some minor unimportant exceptions, is the
area served by the local office identical with the county. Each office reports monthly to the
Department the number and type of clients under supervision - those with suspect sentences,
prisoners released on parole, forensic patients and so on. In this way it is possible to count the
number of forensic patients in each county month by month, i.e. the monthly prevalence of
forensic patients in each county. This registration has taken place since 1977, and for the
present analysis the material from 1980 is used to follow the development in prevalence of
forensic patients. Patients with a placement order, most of them suffer from schizophrenia and
have committed serious violent crime are not under supervision and therefore are not included
in the present material. The number, however, is limited, around 80,(Lund,1997), which
means that our figures are minimum figures covering a least 90% of the total number of
forensic patients.
In 1994 we looked at the development of the prevalence of forensic patients, figure 1, Kramp
and Gabrielsen, 1994.
The dotted line is the number of patients increasing from about 300 in 1980 to about 700 in
1993. The smooth line is the statistical model showing an annual growth rate on 6.83%.From
1980 until 1993, the growth exhibited an almost perfect exponential growth. Such a curve is a
rarity within the social sciences; one expect exponential growth within biology or physics but
never within the social sciences. This is due to the fact, that developments in social sciences
are affected by feed back mechanisms. Nevertheless, to find an exponential growth curve in
this case might be because the forensic patients form a rather small fraction of patients within
the mental health care system, and thereby has not been noticed until now.
Three years later in 1996 we repeated the study, Kramp and Gabrielsen,1996. We extrapolated
the model with an annual growth rate on 6.83%, figure 2, and we inspected how reality - the
number of patients - fitted the model, figure 3. As it appears from the figure the model fits
almost perfect - the growth rate still seems to be 6.83%. It can be added that the prevalence of
forensic patients is still growing - at the end of April 1998 the number has increased to 1068.
One can add this last point to figure 3 and see that the model still fits.
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