Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

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 ?berg, 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, ?berg said.
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Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drug offences following a ruling of the country's supreme court in 2011. According to ?berg, there were about 200 fewer people serving sentences for drug offences in Sweden last March than a year previously.
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Of the fall in prison population between 2004 and 2012, he pointed out, 36% related to theft, 25% to drugs offences and 12% to violent crimes.

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.

Brazilian prisons hold 548,003 citizens, 274 people per 100,000; finally, India's prison population amounts to 385,135, with a per capita rate of just 30 inmates per 100,000 citizens.

Among the countries with the smallest prison populations are Malta, Equatorial Guinea, Luxembourg, French Guyana and Djibouti. Sweden ranked 112th for its prison population.

"QBall" said
I don't think the comparison between the U.S. and Sweden in terms of prison population yields any useful information. Somehow I don't think Sweden is rampant with ethnic gangs (I can't imagine too many Latinos move to Sweden). The Swedish model might work for Sweden but I doubt it can be applied anywhere that has a mixed population.

"Lemmy" said
Wow. That's the most ignorant thing I've read in a while.

"ShepherdsDog" said
if Sweden legalized women carrying .30 caliber belt-feed machine guns, rape would disappear

"N_Fiddledog" said
So here's another possibility that takes all the possibilities Curt mentions in for one unified theory.

In the 2000s to 2008 violent and serious crime begins to skyrocket in Sweden. The Swedish government must make room for serious prisoners. They build new prisons, they begin to look the other way on less serious crimes, less dangerous prisoners are let go easier, after 2008 the serious crime stats start to level out, and voila now we've got another problem, too much prison space, and whataya wanna bet there's a lot of paroled criminals in Sweden who shouldn't be.

Which two countries are the kidnapping capitals of the world?

Australia and Canada.

Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per 100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada.

That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.

So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye?

No, the high numbers of kidnapping cases in these two countries are explained by the fact that parental disputes over child custody are included in the figures.

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This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in Sweden's next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about two offences per 100,000 people.

On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than these other countries.

But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries' records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.

"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.

"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record - one victim, one type of crime, one record."

The current sentencing principles were introduced into the Swedish Penal Code in 1989 with the aim of increasing the predictability and consistency of penal decision-making. The law sets forth "penalty scales"; with maximum and minimum sentences specified individually in relation to each crime. A number of aggravating and mitigating circumstances are provided.