Individuals’ life chances are shaped by the times and events that they experience. This emphasizes the need for studies that focus on staggered birth cohorts. The article presents a new longitudinal data set that includes three complete Swedish birth cohorts, born in 1965, 1975 and 1985. Comparisons between the different birth cohorts show how offending distributions among young offenders, as well as their socio-demographic backgrounds and life chances, have developed over time. The analyses of stability and change presented in the study may serve as a point of departure for more informed discussions of the significance of societal changes for the criminality and life chances of male and female offenders.