This part of the study looks at the network attachments of a group of youths who were placed in secure care facilities in the county of Stockholm at some point during the period from 1991 to 1995. At this time there were five such institutions, admitting young people with serious social difficulties. The problems which result in placements in such facilities often involve violent or high frequency offending but also include a number of other more self-destructive behaviours such as alcohol and/or drug abuse and prostitution. In general, the level of problem behaviours manifested by youths admitted to these institutions is very high. Swedish legislation only allows the social services and the county administrative courts to submit an individual to compulsory institutional care when other measures have already been tried and failed, or when the conditions necessary for other (primarily voluntary) measures to have a fair chance of success are absent. Young people can only be placed in secure care facilities up to the age of 20, and they must be discharged before their twenty-first birthday (SFS 1990: 52).

According to the Swedish penal code (BrB), the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years (chapter 1, paragraph 6) and an individual cannot be convicted of an offence prior to having reached this age. Persons aged 18 or under can only be sentenced to prison if there are exceptional circumstances which merit such a sanction (BrB chapter 30, paragraph 5). In practice, persons below the age of 18 are very rarely sent to prison (Sarnecki 1987).