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Keeping the Balance Between Humanism and Penal Punitivism: Recent Trends in Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Justice in Sweden

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International Handbook of Juvenile Justice

Abstract

Geographically Sweden is one of the margin members of the European Union. Sweden is also rather sparsely populated with a total population of 9 millions. During the last decades every cohort of children/juveniles consist of approximately 100,000. Since the age of legal responsibility in Sweden is 15 years and special legislation still applies for juveniles until they reach 21 years, the juvenile population could be said to consist of around 600,000. It is a well-established fact that the number of young people who have been reported for committing a crime has increased dramatically since World War II. This is not unique to Sweden and is often the same elsewhere in Europe (Estrada, 1999a). It is not unusual to see this change as continuous, that young people are becoming “worse and worse”. An attitude like this obviously affects the measures that are involved in the development of juvenile crime. This report will present the measures against juvenile crime from a criminal (justice) policy perspective and highlight how this policy has changed over the past three decades. The report begins with a general background describing the history of the Swedish juvenile justice system. Thereafter the trends in juvenile delinquency1 are analysed and the responses to crimes that are taken by the Swedish juvenile system are described in more detail. Finally we discuss how the current trends can be understood.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Sweden

    Jerzy Sarnecki (professor) & Felipe Estrada (associate professor)

Authors
  1. Jerzy Sarnecki
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  2. Felipe Estrada
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Josine Junger-Tas

  2. Arizona State University, USA

    Scott. H. Decker

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Sarnecki, J., Estrada, F. (2006). Keeping the Balance Between Humanism and Penal Punitivism: Recent Trends in Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Justice in Sweden. In: Junger-Tas, J., Decker, S.H. (eds) International Handbook of Juvenile Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09478-6_19

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