Charis Kubrin honored with prestigious Stockholm Prize for groundbreaking research disproving immigration-crime myths
When Charis E. Kubrin receives the Stockholm Prize in Criminology at a formal ceremony in Stockholm City Hall in June, she’ll join an elite group of scholars recognized for what's been called “criminology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.”
The UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society is being honored for decades of research that has consistently challenged one of society's most persistent myths: that immigrants bring crime to their new countries. Her findings, which show the opposite is true, have never been more relevant.
“I am grateful to be selected for this incredible honor, as I know so many of those nominated are deserving,” Kubrin said. “Beyond the fanfare, I appreciate the opportunity — the platform — the Prize provides recipients: to share what they have learned from decades of research, in my case on immigration and crime. The importance of making the most of that platform in today's context and climate, in the U.S. and around the world, is not lost on me. This is why I am eager to ensure those findings remain an essential part of the conversation on this topic.”
Jon Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology, emphasized the significance of the recognition.
“The Stockholm Prize is criminology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize,” he said. “Our school is incredibly proud of Professor Kubrin and her important research that dispels pernicious myths about immigrants and crime.”
Anne Ramberg, chair of the Stockholm Criminology Prize Foundation, underscored the critical importance of Kubrin’s work in the current global climate during the prize announcement delivered today.
“Today, as democracy and the rule of law are being challenged in many parts of the world, the value of independent research cannot be overstated,” Ramberg said.
She noted a troubling global trend: “We are witnessing a trend of repression including an expansion of criminal liability, harsher penalties, the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility, extended pretrial detention, the use of anonymous witnesses and secret coercive measures applied for preventive purposes. These developments are seldom supported by research findings. Indeed, they often contradict the consensus of scientific evidence.”
Ramberg pointed specifically to the intersection of the shift with immigration policy — the very area of Kubrin's expertise.
“This repressive shift has frequently been linked to migration accompanied by restrictions on the right to asylum, the weakening of individual legal protections and growing insecurity for immigrants,” she said. “Misinformation and resistance to facts have not only gained ground in public debate, the disregard for research and evidence has also found its way into the legislative process.”
The consequences, Ramberg warned, are severe: “Neglecting science risks undermining the very aims of criminology to prevent crime and to uphold human rights. When policy making becomes driven by populism rather than by evidence, society as a whole stands to suffer.”
A century of evidence, still fighting perception
The irony at the heart of Kubrin’s work is striking: while study after study over the past century has shown immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born populations, public perception stubbornly clings to the opposite belief.
“I think back to the Wickersham Commission in 1931 producing a report on crime among the foreign born where they reported that foreign born individuals have lower levels of offending than the native born and there have been hundreds and hundreds of studies since then that generally arrive at the same conclusion,” Kubrin explained in a video interview with Lawrence W. Sherman, co-chair of the Stockholm Prize jury.
She tells her students at UC Irvine that the perception that immigrants are responsible for crime “is nothing new. It feels new. It feels particularly strong and salient in today’s context but this is a historical reality. Immigrants are often blamed for societal problems including crime.”
The challenge, Kubrin said, is bridging the gap between research and public understanding.
“The research needs to have a bigger impact on the public perception,” she said. “The question is how. That’s the million-dollar question. I'm still working out that question but, at a minimum, we need to make sure that the studies and the findings reach the policymakers directly so that at the local, state, national and international level, they are using evidence to design policy.”
From crime drop to nuanced understanding
Kubrin’s interest in immigration and crime was sparked in the early 2000s by an op-ed from sociologist Robert Sampson in the New York Times. Sampson argued that increased immigration to American cities might actually help explain the dramatic crime drop of the 1990s and early 2000s.
“I remember thinking that's a provocative argument,” Kubrin recalled. “I requested the paper that he had based that finding on and interestingly, that really motivated me to get involved in doing some work in this area.”
Her subsequent research, along with work by colleagues, has provided evidence supporting immigration as one of the factors contributing to the historic crime decline during those years.
But Kubrin's work goes beyond confirming that immigrants don’t increase crime. In numerous studies, she has found that immigrants actually have a protective effect — they don’t just fail to increase crime, they may help reduce it.
The next frontier: precision over generalization
Kubrin points to the next evolution in immigration research: moving beyond broad generalizations to understand the nuances.
“Most of the studies, my own work included, lump immigrants together and downplay the differences among immigrants in everything from race and ethnicity to sending country to location where they settle to cultural differences,” she explained. “The vast majority of this work is useful but, now, if we think about the next round of immigrant studies both in the United States and abroad, I think that the next goal really is to begin to attend to some of that nuance.”
In a recent paper published in the journal Crime and Justice, Kubrin and longtime collaborator Graham Ousey argue that researchers rely too heavily on simple dichotomies like “foreign born versus native born” or “documented versus undocumented.”
Instead, they advocate for “theorizing about and empirically investigating the multi-layered and multi-faceted dimensions of immigration so that we can identify the essence of what makes particular immigrant groups, or even particular immigrants, conceptually distinct and, therefore, analytically informative for studying crime.”
“It's from those nuances and that kind of attention to detail that better policy is formulated,” Kubrin said.
A prize with purpose
Established in 2005 by the Swedish government and first awarded in 2006, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology was conceived during a dinner conversation between Sherman of the University of Pennsylvania and Jerzy Sarnecki of Stockholm University. The two professors, both members of the Scientific Commission of International Society for Criminology, discussed establishing a “Nobel Prize” in criminology — an idea that initially seemed unfeasible but eventually gained traction with support from Swedish government officials.
The prize, which next year amounts to 1,500,000 Swedish kronor (about 150,000 in U.S. dollars), recognizes “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.”
“Each year the prize is awarded to one or more individuals whose research or the practical application of research has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of criminology, the reduction of crime and the promotion of human rights,” Ramberg explained. “The vision behind the establishment of the prize was to draw international attention to criminological research and its vital importance for shaping effective and humane crime policies.”
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation, established by the Swedish government and the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, administers the award and an independent international jury selects laureates from a pool of nominees.
The award ceremony, held each June at Stockholm City Hall, has been presented on several occasions by Her Majesty The Queen of Sweden in the presence of the Minister of Justice and other distinguished guests. The ceremony is held in conjunction with the international Stockholm Criminology Symposium, a three-day event that brings together more than 500 criminologists, researchers and practitioners from around the world.
A platform for impact
For Kubrin, the prize represents more than personal recognition — it’s an opportunity to amplify evidence-based findings at a critical moment in history.
In an era when immigration remains one of the most contentious political issues globally, Kubrin's research — and now her platform as a Stockholm Prize laureate — offers something increasingly rare: evidence that challenges assumptions and invites more thoughtful, nuanced policy discussions.
As she prepares for her prize lecture in Stockholm, Kubrin remains focused on the ultimate goal: ensuring that decades of research findings become “an essential part of the conversation on this topic” — not just in academic circles, but among policymakers and the public who shape immigration policy and public opinion.