Winners of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology 2025
The International Jury of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation has announced their decision to award the 2025 Stockholm Prize in Criminology to Frances Crook and Bryan Stevenson, for their applied criminological research as practitioners that succeeded in reducing cruel and unusual punishment.
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is the world’s most prestigious award in the field of criminology. It is awarded annually and amounts to 1.5 million SEK. The 2025 prize winners are two outstanding practitioners who applied criminology to help reduce cruel and unusual punishment. They were announced in a ceremony at Stockholm University on October 23. The awards will be presented next June in Stockholm.
Reducing imprisonment of young offenders
Frances Crook, as Chief Executive of the UK’s Howard League for Penal Reform from 1986 to 2021, made outstanding use of criminological research to reduce imprisonment of young offenders in favour of more humane rehabilitation programmes in the community. Responding in part to her research and campaigning, government practices moved the number of children under 18 housed in prison from 3,500 when she began to 500 when she retired – an 85 percent reduction. She also analysed police arrest data by age of arrestees annually across 43 territorial police forces, asking them to find alternatives to arrests. The annual number of arrests of children over that time period dropped from 330,000 to 70,000, a reduction of 80 percent.
Saving convicts from being executed
Bryan Stevenson, as founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) since 1989, has fostered the use of criminological research in his representation of petitioners before US Supreme Court to win cases that banned executions and life imprisonment of young offenders. In the same time period, EJI represented death row inmates in a range of different courts, saving 130 US convicts from being executed. In his most notable case, representing a convicted murderer who had been 14 years old at the time of the crime in Miller v. Alabama, he persuaded the US Supreme Court to rule that statutory mandatory sentences to life imprisonment without parole for crimes committed by juveniles were unlawful violations of the Constitution.
Contributions of criminology to benefit humankind
The complementary works of the 2025 Stockholm Prize Laureates have demonstrated the benefit of criminology to humankind. In a time of turmoil over human rights, their work has focused both policies and individuals. As leader of the oldest penal reform organisation in the world – inspired by its namesake, the 18th-Century prison reformer John Howard – Stockholm Laureate Frances Crook achieved policies leading to substantial reductions in the arrest and imprisonment of children. As founder of the only source of legal aid for prisoners on death row in Alabama, Bryan Stevenson’s advocacy prevented many unjust executions of adults and all life sentences for crimes by juveniles.
Biographical Details
Frances Crook is currently an Honorary Visting Fellow at the University of Leicester School of Criminology and has also been an Honorary Visting Fellow at the London School of Economics. A history graduate of the University of Liverpool, she has worked for Amnesty International. She was twice elected a local Councillor in the London Borough of Barnet. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Liverpool and Leeds Beckett University. In 2010 Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the honour of Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for services to youth justice.
Bryan Stevenson is currently Professor of Law at New York University and Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. When he was 16 years old, his grandfather was stabbed to death as a robbery victim in Philadelphia. He graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Eastern University and earned his law degree from Harvard University Law School. Since then he has argued six cases before the US Supreme Court. He has recently established the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors the names of each of more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. His many honours and appointments include a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ Fellowship, honorary degrees from 12 universities, and Sweden’s Olof Palme Prize in 2000.
Watch press conference and interviews with the award winners
About the Stockholm Prize in Criminology
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is an international prize established under the aegis of Sweden’s Ministry of Justice and with major donations from the Torsten Söderberg Foundation. The prize is awarded for outstanding achievements in criminological research or for the application of research results by practitioners for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights.
The objectives of the prize are to promote the development of improved knowledge of the causes of crime at an individual and structural level, more effective and humane public policies for dealing with criminal offenders, greater knowledge of alternative crime prevention strategies inside and outside the judicial system, policies for helping the victims of crime, better ways to reduce the global problem of illegal or abusive practices that may occur in the administration of justice.
The prize was presented for the first time in June 2006 at the City Hall in Stockholm, with, in addition to the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, the US based Jerry Lee Foundation and Japan based Hitachi Mirai Foundation as the original donors. The prize ceremony has been held every year since then, always in conjunction with the 3-day Stockholm Criminology Symposium organized by the Swedish Nation Council on Crime Prevention. It is awarded annually and amounts to 1.5 million SEK. The prize is usually presented by H.M. Queen Silvia, sometimes by Sweden’s Minister of Justice.
Last updated: October 23, 2024
Source: Communications Office