Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
24 replies, posted
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Decline partly put down to strong focus on rehabilitation and more lenient sentences for some offences.
Prison numbers in Sweden, which have been falling by around 1% a year since 2004, dropped by 6% between 2011 and 2012 and are expected to do the same again both this year and next year. Photograph: Paul Doyle/Alamy
Sweden has experienced such a sharp fall in the number of prison admissions in the past two years that it has decided to close down four prisons and a remand centre.
"We have seen an out-of-the-ordinary decline in the number of inmates," said Nils Öberg, the head of Sweden's prison and probation services. "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 around 1% a year since 2004, dropped by 6% between 2011 and 2012 and are expected to do the same again both this year and next, Öberg said.
As a result, the prison service has this year closed down prisons in the towns of Åby, Håja, Båtshagen, and Kristianstad, two of which will probably be sold and two of which will be passed for temporary use to other government authorities.
Öberg 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 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%," he said.
In the opinion piece in Sweden's DN newspaper in which he announced the closures, Öberg said that Sweden needed to work even harder on rehabilitating prisoners, doing more to help them once they had returned to society.
One partial explanation for the sudden drop in admissions may be that Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drug offences following a ruling of the country's supreme court in 2011. According to Öberg, there were about 200 fewer people serving sentences for drug offences in Sweden last March than a year previously.
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According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million.
According to data collected by the International Centre for Prison Studies, the five countries with the highest prison population are the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India.
The US has a prison population of 2,239,751, equivalent to 716 people per 100,000. China ranks second with 1,640,000 people behind bars, or 121 people per 100,000, while Russia's inmates are 681,600, amounting to 475 individuals per 100,000.
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[url]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-prisons-number-inmates-plummets[/url]
Good old nordic sensibilities.
Why close the prisons?
They should rent them out to America
Fuck, I'd kill to go to prison in Sweden.
I salute the Swedish authorities for getting down to grass root problems.
Well since swedish law is useless... of course people aint going to prison!
To be honest our juridical system is broken as fuck. A while back this 15-year old girl was raped by six guys and while the boys were sentenced at first they were released pretty soon after based on the ground that the girl was only in a "difficult situation and not actually helpless".
[url=http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17562858.ab]Swedish article (and pretty sensationalist but pretty much all our news sources are)[/url]
Oh, and the judge basically claimed [url=http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17559747.ab]"She said 'no' but that doesn't mean it's rape"[/url] so there's that
Yeah, there is a delicate balance between putting everyone in prison for profit in the United States and releasing rapists "just because" in Sweden
[QUOTE=Coyoteze;42831071]To be honest our juridical system is broken as fuck. A while back this 15-year old girl was raped by six guys and while the boys were sentenced at first they were released pretty soon after based on the ground that the girl was only in a "difficult situation and not actually helpless".
[url=http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17562858.ab]Swedish article (and pretty sensationalist but pretty much all our news sources are)[/url]
Oh, and the judge basically claimed [url=http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17559747.ab]"She said 'no' but that doesn't mean it's rape"[/url] so there's that[/QUOTE]
This doesn't appear to be the norm given how strict Sweden's laws are when it comes to consent (which is why the rate of rape is so high there)
Hearing one case where the justice system failed and assuming that's how the system always works is exactly how news outlets like the Daily Mail become so successful. Aftonbladet is a tabloid of similar format, isn't it?
[QUOTE=Zeke129;42831269]This doesn't appear to be the norm given how strict Sweden's laws are when it comes to consent (which is why the rate of rape is so high there)
Hearing one case where the justice system failed and assuming that's how the system always works is exactly how news outlets like the Daily Mail become so successful. Aftonbladet is a tabloid of similar format, isn't it?[/QUOTE]
Our laws aren't that much stricter to consent than most other countries. As for our raised statistics on amounts of rapes, I really don't know. It's in our blood? v:v:v )
But yeah, Aftonbladet is pretty much our Daily Mail. But most of our news sources are like that. I don't think we have any unbiased news sources, to be honest.
[QUOTE=Bird;42831299]Well that is a pretty special case. I'm not saying the guys were in the right, but it wasn't violent and they were young. I doubt they would have gone to prison. I think they should have been found guilty, but my point is that this doesn't happen all the time. Bad jury, bad judge.[/QUOTE]
If she said no, that should be simple enough. Age and no violence doesn't really excuse what happened.
And maybe not this in particular, but we have a tendency to let people go easily. Or at least that's what [I]I[/I] keep seeing. Our police are fine, it's the whole court-bit that tends to be a bit... eh.
[QUOTE=Bird;42831461]As for our laws, we actually have more strict definition of rape than most countries. Sometimes it's enough to have been touching the victim to get a rape sentence, and any sexual act when someone is drunk is rape. So according to Swedish law I've been raped a handful of times.[/QUOTE]
Isn't that the norm in terms of definition of rape though? Or am I too used to our laws that I figure they're common everywhere else :v:
In the USA consent laws barely exist in some states. It's more like "was she drunk is she married and badly dressed and was she hurt at all?????"
[QUOTE=person11;42831696]In the USA consent laws barely exist in some states. It's more like "was she drunk is she married and badly dressed and was she hurt at all?????"[/QUOTE]
not true
[QUOTE=Hellle;42831029]Well since swedish law is useless... of course people aint going to prison![/QUOTE]
It should be a lot more strict
[QUOTE=Alxnotorious;42830963]Fuck, I'd kill to go to prison in Sweden.[/QUOTE]
I realize this is a joke, but you actually wouldn't. Nordic prisons are nicer than American prisons, hell, probably nicer than living in poverty in the US, but they are not better than any given free life in any given Nordic country.
[QUOTE=person11;42831696]In the USA consent laws barely exist in some states. It's more like "was she drunk is she married and badly dressed and was she hurt at all?????"[/QUOTE]
The problem is more about stupid judges and insane communities.
I know I am exaggerating. The laws are not that much worse than in Sweden, they are just actively being broken or misinterpreted by bad judges and corrupt law enforcement officials.
[QUOTE=person11;42832761]I know I am exaggerating. The laws are not that much worse than in Sweden, they are just actively being broken or misinterpreted by bad judges and corrupt law enforcement officials.[/QUOTE]
Pretty much, that's the US issue is that people actively undermine the whole process. Its even worse since the US tends to have a very delicate relationship with sex.
[QUOTE=Swilly;42832791]Pretty much, that's the US issue is that people actively undermine the whole process. Its even worse since the US tends to have a very delicate relationship with sex.[/QUOTE]
To be blunt, the US is probably one of the most prude countries in the western world.
Hell, we seem positively casual about it down in the UK compared to some American states
Which is hilarious due to the sheer metric ton of porn we make.
There is no significant trend of rapists being acquitted because of what the victim wore/how she acted/etc. in the U.S. Prove me wrong.
[QUOTE=Alxnotorious;42830963]Fuck, I'd kill to go to prison in Sweden.[/QUOTE]
Some have came here and done just that...
[QUOTE=Coyoteze;42831382]Our laws aren't that much stricter to consent than most other countries. As for our raised statistics on amounts of rapes, I really don't know. It's in our blood? v:v:v )
But yeah, Aftonbladet is pretty much our Daily Mail. [/QUOTE]
it's extremely hard to compare crimes between countries.
In sweden, every sexual crime between two people are counted individually for statistics whole many other countries count them as one. if you get kidnapped and raped 100 times for a year, that's 100 "rapes" in the statistics. India has two rape offences per 100 000 inhabitants. I doubt it's accurate.
[url]http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372[/url]
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