Swedish Criminal Justice Policy Action Lab

The Swedish Criminal Justice Policy Action Lab (SCAL) brings together a team of quantitative crime researchers highly trained in applying quasi-experimental methods for impact evaluation to large datasets with the main goal of informing policy makers about optimal policy design.

Recent advances in access to register data and other types of “big data” have provided researchers with the possibility to apply quasi-experimental methods to better identify causal effects in crime research.

This “credibility revolution” have already transformed other social sciences, such as Economics, but the fact that this transformation has still not fully taken place in Swedish crime research may seem ironic given that the country’s rich data would seem to place it in a unique position to contribute to the international crime research scene.

SCAL is a cross-university and cross-disciplinary research environment that also is connected to world leading crime research environments.

The program targets two broad areas: sentencing and police enforcement, which are at the heart of the current policy discussions.

SCAL takes advantage of the unique complementarities in the fields of Criminology and Economics to create a research environment that will generate evidence that transforms public policy and train the next generation of practitioners.

SCAL will partner with local and national authorities to guarantee that the knowledge produced is disseminated to the surrounding society.