Sweden has experienced such a sharp drop in the number of prison admissions over the past two years that its justice authorities have decided to close down four prisons and a remand center.
“We have seen an out-of-the-ordinary decline in the number of inmates,” Sweden’s prison and probation services head Nils Oberg said. “Now we have the opportunity to close down a part of our infrastructure that we don’t need at this point of time.”
Prison numbers in Sweden, which have been falling by about 1 percent a year since 2004, dropped by 6 percent between 2011 and last year and are expected to do the same again both this year and next year, Oberg said.
As a result, the prison service has this year closed down prisons in the towns of Aby, Haja, Batshagen and Kristianstad, two of which will probably be sold, and two of which will be passed for temporary use to other government authorities.
Oberg said that while nobody knew for sure why prison numbers had dropped so steeply, he hoped that Sweden’s liberal prison approach, with its strong focus on rehabilitating prisoners, had played at least a part.
“We certainly hope that the efforts we invest in rehabilitation and preventing relapse of crime has had an impact, but we don’t think that this could explain the entire drop of 6 percent,” he said.
In an opinion piece in Sweden’s DN newspaper in which he announced the closures, Oberg said that Sweden needed to work even harder on rehabilitating prisoners, doing more to help them once they have returned to society.
Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drugs offenses following a ruling of the Swedish Supreme Court in 2011, explaining at least part of the sudden drop in admissions. There were about 200 fewer people serving sentences for drugs offenses in Sweden in March last year than a year previously, Oberg said.
Sweden’s prison services will retain the option to reopen two of the closed prisons, should the number of inmates rise.
“We are not at the point of concluding that this is a long-term trend and that this is a change in paradigm,” Oberg said. “What we are certain of is that the pressure on the criminal justice system has dropped markedly in recent years.”
Stockholm University criminology professor Hanns von Hofer said that much of the fall in prison numbers could be attributed to a recent shift in policy toward probationary sanctions, instead of short prison sentences for minor thefts, drugs offenses and violent crimes.
Between 2004 and last year, the number of people jailed for theft, drug offenses and violent crimes fell by 36 percent, 25 percent and 12 percent respectively, he said.
According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004.
Last year, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million.
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
India and Canada yesterday reached a string of agreements, including on critical mineral cooperation and a “landmark” uranium supply deal for nuclear power, the countries’ leaders said in New Delhi. The pacts, which also covered technology and promoting the use of renewable energy, were announced after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hailed a fresh start in the relationship between their nations. “Our ties have seen a new energy, mutual trust and positivity,” Modi said. Carney’s visit is a key step forward in ties that effectively collapsed in 2023 after Ottawa accused New Delhi
RSS