Abstract
Sweden is not the same country as it was in 1974, a time when its Justice Minister predicted there would only be 600 people in prison by the 1980s (Pratt 2008a, p. 132). The expansion of the American approach to crime control also affected Scandinavia, which despite all else is still a point of reference when considering criminal policy alternatives to the “global firestorm of law and order” (Wacquant 2014; Brandariz García 2014). The Scandinavian exception has been extensively analysed by criminologists. Among the most pertinent analyses was a study by John Pratt (2008b) in 2008, in which he highlighted its historical, economic, cultural and political background, pointing out its downturn and the precarious nature of its future existence within a context which is openly hostile to penal welfarism and, in general, to all policies associated with post-war social democracy. Drug and immigration policy and the emergene of the crime victim as a central political narrative over the past decades have eroded Scandinavian anti-punitive hegemony, with the building of jails, an increase in the prisoner population and harsher sentences now becoming politically attractive. Nevertheless, the Scandinavian attitude to criminal punishment has not shown a linear decline, and the residue of habits and practices from past decades continues to produce differing results and views that invite a certain optimism.
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Notes
- 1.
See the interesting conference given by the current director of Swedish prisons, Öberg (2014).
- 2.
See Ortiz de Urbina Gimeno, I., “Economics as a Tool in Legislative Evaluation: Cost-analysis, Cost-efficacy and Cost-benefit”, in this volume.
- 3.
OECD, “Government capacity to assure high quality regulation in Sweden, OECD reviews of regulatory reform”, 2007, available at: http://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/38286959.pdf.
- 4.
See Muñoz de Morales Romero, “Codification and Legislative Technique in the United States of America”, in this volume.
- 5.
Some of the people interviewed for this article expressed this opinion, as well as the view that, in general, the quality of European Union legislation was poor, especially when compared to Swedish law.
- 6.
Also see David Arter critique of Scandinavian parliamentary committees (2004, p. 593): “Ironically, despite the Scandinavian reputation for openness and transparency in government, the standing committees of the Nordic parliaments are neither open nor demonstrably responsive when viewed in comparative perspective. Their deliberations on bills are not open to the public and no transcript of proceedings is subsequently posted on the parliament’s website.”
- 7.
In 1977 alone, for example, the University of Uppsala Faculty of Law provided 40 opinions on a number of draft bills (Strömholm 1981). The majority of criminal law academics have chaired or taken part in committees of inquiry and/or participated during the consultation phase, partly due, of course, to their reduced number (the Swedish population is under 10 million people).
- 8.
El BRÅ does not use its own evaluation methodology, but rather flexibly employs quantitative and qualitative methods which are habitually used in criminological. The council has occasionally worked with some of the proponents of quasi-experiment crime prevention and policy models, such as David Farrington's “evidence-based crime prevention” without that meaning a wholesale acceptance of quantitative evaluation.
- 9.
OCDE, “Government capacity to assure high quality regulation in Sweden, OECD reviews of regulatory reform”, op. cit., p. 18.
- 10.
- 11.
For more on parliamentary committees, see Arter (2008), pp. 122–143.
- 12.
- 13.
For more on the setting up of institutions (political buffers) such as codification commissions which cushion the direct pressure on political representatives, see Roberts et al. (2003), p. 180. In Sweden, the National Council for Crime Prevention would seem to fulfil this role efficiently.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor Petter ASP for his extraordinary hospitality and help during my stay at the University of Stockholm. Thanks to him I can also express my gratitude to those who gave me their time in order to carry out interviews or give their valuable opinions, especially staff at the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention and the Ministry of Justice, to Henrik Tham, Stina Holmberg, Jan Andersson and Magnus Ulväng, and to Marta Muñoz de Morales for her assistance during the writing of the article. All errors are mine and mine alone.
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Maroto Calatayud, M. (2016). Criminal Policy Evaluation and Rationality in Legislative Procedure: The Example of Sweden. In: Nieto Martín, A., Muñoz de Morales Romero, M. (eds) Towards a Rational Legislative Evaluation in Criminal Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32895-9_6
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