Stockholm Prize in Criminology awarded to practitioners working to reduce cruel and unusual punishment

Reducing the imprisonment of young offenders in favour of more humane rehabilitation programmes in the community and banning executions and life imprisonment of young offenders are the most remarkable accomplishments of the two awardees. 

Reducing imprisonment of young offenders

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. As Chief Executive of the UK’s Howard League for Penal Reform from 1986 to 2021, Frances Crook made outstanding use of criminological research to reduce the 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% 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%.

Saving convicts from being executed

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 recently established the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honours 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.      

As founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) since 1989, Bryan Stevenson has fostered the use of criminological research in his representation of petitioners before the US Supreme Court to win cases that banned executions and life imprisonment of young offenders. In the same 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 Stockholm Prize in Criminology is the world’s most prestigious award in the field of criminology, established under the aegis of the Swedish Ministry of Justice. It is awarded internationally for outstanding achievement in criminological research or in the application of research results by practitioners or scholars for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights. 

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 on 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.

The prize has been awarded annually since 2006 and exceeds 130.000 EUR.  The 2025 awards will be presented this June, in Stockholm. 

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