Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice

Imagine a prison. What does it look like? Who live inside? How are they treated? Ask these questions of children, and they will tend to give you a pretty straightforward answer based on what they have learned from adults and quite often what they have seen in movies, TV series and on the Internet: “The windows are very small and it’s dark,” “you wear a blue uniform—or orange,” “the guards are strict because you are criminal” and so on. Many learn from childhood that if a person does something very wrong the police will come and get you, and if you are a “criminal” you will go to prison.

Labour in different forms has been a central tenet in most carceral systems from the early modern houses of correction and up until today. At the same time, the central feature of the welfare state that developed during the post-Second World War decades was labour or, to quote one of Sweden’s most well-known political economists, “work has been the cement of the Swedish welfare state. In the following I will discuss the connection between labour and the Swedish prisons in the post-Second World War decades. More precisely, I will argue that the real character of the much-talked-about Swedish prison reforms in this period cannot be understood unless one takes into account the central role given to labour. Furthermore, a closer look at the role given to labour will also contribute to a more general discussion about whether we can talk about a special Swedish (or Scandinavian) model for penal reform.

This chapter charts the structural transformation of the Norwegian welfare state and attendant shifts in the modality of punishment over the course of the 20th century and beyond. Between 1900 and 2014, the Norwegian welfare state embodied three distinctive forms: first, a residualist, minimally decommodifying regime of Bismarckian welfare politics; second, a comprehensive, universalist regime of social democracy that was broadly redistributive and decommodifying along Fordist-Keynesian lines; third, a hybridized semi-neoliberal regime that maintained important elements of social democracy while implementing marketized logics of state governance, relying increasingly on private providers to deliver core state services and witnessing accelerating socioeconomic disparities.

The use of imprisonment in open prisons is considerable in the Danish penal system. Accordingly, the open prisons have attracted a lot of international attention. In the past few years, this has especially been reflected in the literature about “Nordic Penal Exceptionalism” (Ugelvik and Dullum 2012; Pratt and Eriksson 2013). The open prison institution is considered an example of the allegedly humane conditions in the Nordic/Scandinavian countries, which has been explained, among other things, as a result of the Nordic countries’ egalitarian and humane policies. But is this assumption correct? Part of the answer to this question is to be found in the history of the open prisons in Denmark.

It’s August 2015 and I am sitting in East Jutland prison in Denmark in the middle of a focus group interview with long-term prisoners several of who have sentences running in double digits. This is one of the most modern high-security facilities in all of the Danish penal estate and the prisoners we talk to have generally been imprisoned for many years. I am together with two American research colleagues who are asking the prisoners about how they experience punishment in the Danish penal system.

Anne A is a prison officer, and for years, she has been working behind the walls—in low-security and high-security wings, with remand and sentenced prisoners. She says: We are there fifty per cent in order to keep an eye on them, to ensure that they stay here [in prison]. The other fifty per cent we are trying to help them. They may be drug users or have other problems, and it’s just as much our duty to help them as to watch them. And when we help, this contributes to security just as much as a locked door or an alarm.

The number of prisoners in Sweden categorized as drug abusers have increased substantially in the last 20 years according to the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (SPPS). Drug abusers are defined by SPPS as those who have used illicit drugs during the previous 12 months (Ekbom et al. 2006). In 1970 about 20 % of the prisoners could be classified as drug abusers, while they made up 28 % of the prison population in 1997 (Amilon and Edstedt 1998). In 2010 the number of prisoners with drug problems had risen to 60 % (Ekbom et al. 2011). One reason for this increase may be the sentencing policy.

The intricate relation between welfare and punishment in Nordic prisons is especially noticeable in present prison drug treatment. As an institution within the institution, prison-based drug treatment programs are to deliver a welfare service to incarcerated citizens on line with what non-incarcerated citizens are entitled to. However, the larger institutional context (the prison) as well as the general criminal justice political discourse naturally interfere with and affect such service delivery. As a result of this, it becomes difficult to disentangle what is in fact a part of the welfare service (drug treatment) and a part of punishment and the related disciplinary sanctions. The questions arise whether prison disciplinary sanctions can be re-interpreted as being a part of drug treatment? Whether drug treatment is mainly to be seen as a crime-reducing strategy? And can prison drug treatment programs, intended to mirror community programs, simply become enmeshed in the traditional prison control/rehabilitation conundrum? In this chapter I attempt to address these questions.

The industrialisation of Europe and Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to social unrest and widespread poverty. Prisons and penitentiaries became religious institutions where the prisoners, in addition to being punished, were to be improved through work, spiritual guidance and education. The Confirmation Act of 1736 played a decisive role in the introduction of universal education in 1739, with a strong emphasis on religious education. The improvement philosophy that dominated prisons and penitentiaries followed the same religious track. We can see how the education system and the penal system were closely allied, where the school was seen as part of the rehabilitation process. Prison schools did their best to keep up with developments in the education system in society at large. In 1875, teaching was provided at all the eight penal institutions in Norway. The total number of school staff was 24—including chaplains, teachers, organists and others (Beretning om Rigets Strafanstalter for Aaret 1875).

Inspired by perspectives and research on procedural justice, I will examine in this chapter how current and former prisoners evaluate the re-entry process they have experienced during and after incarceration. I strive to contribute to a constructive debate surrounding the possibilities and limitations of re-entry work by exploring which approaches current and former prisoners perceive as supportive and fair, and which they perceive to be offensive and unfair. I view re-entry work as series of different interventions and a social process (Maruna and Immarigeon 2004). Re-entry is most often a long-term process of transition from conviction, incarceration to the community which starts prior to release and continues well afterwards (Laub and Sampson 2003 Understanding the re-entry process requires a perspective on how the different correctional interventions offenders are exposed to help them change and avoid continued involvement in criminal behaviour (Maruna and Immarigeon 2004).

Denmark, like the other Scandinavian countries, is built on the “Nordic welfare model” where policies emerge through political dialogue and parallel decision-making (Lappi-Seppälä 2007). However, the “Nordic Welfare Model” is under pressure and the previous expert-driven and research-led strategy especially recognised within penal policy-making has been challenged and changed to a more politically ruled approach over the last decades (Lappi-Seppälä and Storgaard 2014). Nevertheless, the Scandinavian countries are still acknowledged for their stable penal policies and by some categorised as the epitome of “Scandinavian penal exceptionalism” (Pratt 2008a, b; Lappi-Seppälä 2007). The arguments for including Denmark in this “exception” are among others the country’s relatively low prison population rate trend varying from 61 to 72 per 100,000 of the national population the last 15 years; the rather stable total capacity of prisons with places for about 4,000 inmates (World Prison Brief); and the comparatively low sentences where 59 %. 6).

The contradiction in the work of correctional services between executing a punishment imposed by `a reaction to a crime, and implementing the rehabilitative element that dominates its contents is a well-known and much discussed subject. It is perhaps even more prominent in a community setting than in prison, and a perceived balance—or imbalance—between the two elements in that situation may strongly influence the level of its acceptance in society. In this chapter, I will present a short introduction to the basic principles in Norwegian corrections and show how these permeate the development of community corrections by describing their various forms, both as a court sentence and as a way to serve a prison sentence in the community. I will then discuss the level of acceptance for the current balance on the control/rehabilitation dimension.

The concept of normalisation—or normality—has been used to an ever-increasing extent in prisons policies since the 1970s in the Nordic countries, and gradually also in many other countries. It is not an unambiguous concept. In this article, I will offer my proposal for a common Nordic definition of the concept based on relevant Nordic sources of law. My approach to this subject is characterised by practical experience from my position as Prison Governor combined with my ongoing theoretical work with prisons.

All Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) have incarceration rates below 71 per 100,000 inhabitants, with the notable exception of Greenland. These rates are significantly lower than most developed countries and scholars have associated this trend with the non-punitive ideals associated with the Nordic Welfare Model. Indeed, the Nordic Welfare Model has been historically characterized by social cohesion and a substantial reallocation of resources that perpetuates relatively small socio-economic differences between individuals (Kvist et al. 2012). In terms of criminal justice systems, these tenets suggest a system of corrections that is focused on rehabilitation and reintegration, not punishment (Pratt and Eriksson 2012; Pratt 2008).

In this chapter, I will examine the penal and mixed-gender practices surrounding female prisoners in Denmark and attempt to unfold how these practices both support and constrain the well-being and welfare of incarcerated women. I will examine the ways of how the practice of mixed-gendered prisons enables and restricts imprisoned women. In doing so, I will refer to Judith Butler (2004a) and her question: ‘What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?’ (2004a, p. 58), which, in the context of this chapter, can be re-phrased as: What kinds of lives are viable for female prisoners in Danish prisons? Gender equality, which refers to both men and women having the same possibilities and rights to participate in societal life (I discuss this further below), is said to be a core value in advanced welfare regimes like Denmark (Bekendtgørelse 2013, Borchorst and Dahlerup 2003).

The publication of the annual State Budget is always a significant political event in Norway, and the 2013 budget (released on 8 October 2012) was no exception. One of the major new developments made public that day was the fact that Kongsvinger prison, until then an unremarkable medium-sized prison with both high-security and low-security wings serving the larger Kongsvinger area, would soon reopen as Norway’s first all-foreign prison. About a month later, the North-Eastern regional office of the Norwegian Correctional Services received a letter from the central Correctional Services administration office in Oslo. According to the letter, the target group for this new kind of institution would be male prisoners who had received a final expulsion order from the immigration authorities, and who were going to be either deported from the country upon release, or transferred to a prison in their country of origin to serve out some portion of their sentence there. The letter emphasized that although prisoners would be provided with services targeted at their specific status and situation, these services would be of the same quality as those you would expect to find in a Norwegian prison.

Between May 2013 and November 2014, I had visited 15 prisons in the United Kingdom, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Azerbaijan. These prison visits were the backbone of a project inspired by the travels and work of John Howard (1726–1790). Anyone interested in prisons ought to know who John Howard was. His countless visits to institutions of correction and of confinement all over Europe, and his books describing with exacting precision what he found (see, e.g. Howard 1791, 1792), were an eye-opener for 18th-century society and set people thinking about what prisons were like and what they should (or should not) be. Although he was a man of rather limited personal ambition or skill in terms of policymaking, his activities and publications had a great impact, which often ended up placing him in the foreground as a major philanthropist and prison reformer. In his books he describes and analyses detention and conditions of detention in a way that can be seen as an embryo of the work of national and international monitoring bodies of our day (Smith, forthcoming).

International organs review rights performance regularly and while one may dispute their objectivity, their access to relevant information has risen significantly in recent years. Through this material, we have engaged in a longitudinal, comparative analysis of penal exceptionalism in Scandinavia. We contrast in particular the findings of the Committee against Torture (CAT) for Norway, Sweden and Denmark against four Western European states (Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy). In other words, we compare the Scandinavian states with countries with similar economic development and determine to what extent there are differences in detention conditions.

Analytically, one could argue that the literature on Scandinavian or Nordic exceptionalism has been characterised by a logic of juxtaposition where specific prisons in specific countries have been used as stand-ins for two ideal types: (1) Punitive penal state prisons, with high prison population rates and punitive and coercive regimes that lack any proper focus on rehabilitation; (2) Egalitarian welfare state prisons, where punishment is humane, rehabilitative, supportive, inclusive and future-oriented, and where imprisonment is an intervention which is ultimately designed to empower prisoners to increase their chances of returning to society and living a good life post release.