Penal Policies in the Nordic Countries 1960–2010

The article gives an overview of major changes in Nordic penal policies during the last 50 years. Three main threads are distinguished. From the late 1960s onwards the use of imprisonment was curbed by restricting the use of indeterminate sanctions, relaxing prison regimes, expanding the use of alternatives, and by reducing penalties for traditional property offenses and drunken driving. Partly overlapping with the period of ‘rational and humane’ criminal policy, attitudes were stiffening from the 1980s onwards, first towards drug offenses, then from the 1990s in violent and sexual offenses, often initiated by the Swedish models. The third thread underlines the fact that penal policies and law reforms are often ambivalent with both ‘repressive and liberal’ elements, as is the case with prison reforms, juvenile justice, and the expansion of community alternatives. In all, the Nordic countries were able to keep their incarceration rates lower than the rest of Europe, where several nations started in the 1960s from levels below the Nordic ones but ended up with much higher figures. The Nordic countries have not only much lower incarceration rates but also fewer offenders under supervised control, lower levels of fear and punitive demands, less serious violence, and fewer property offenses. Prisons are smaller and prison conditions better. So, even if also Nordic crime policy has become more offensive, more politicized, and more adaptive to the voices of the media, the talk of Nordic exceptionalism remains justified. Explanations go back to socio-economic and political structures and cultural traditions, high social and institutional trust, strong welfare states with smaller welfare differences, and consensual and corporatist political culture.