Law, Crime and History

Volume 12, issue 1 (2024): 51-73

ISSN: 2045-9238

CRIME POLICY, THE OPEN SOCIETY, AND THE GOVERNANCE OF TERRITORY[1]

Robert Andersson

Linnæus University

Abstract

In recent decades Sweden’s liberal crime policy has been replaced by tough on crime policies. The conventional criminological answer, regarding it as a turnout of right-wing policy, overlooks the importance of the specific historical settings in Sweden, and the argument of this paper is that the changes in the trajectory of crime policy ought to be regarded as a shift in the rationale of governance modifying the Swedish state’s self-understanding; substituting the welfare state with the judicial state. This governance focuses on the maintenance of territory instead of the care of the population, and the transition shows itself in the shift from remedying social problems through social policy to managing public order problems by means of crime policy. My argument will be that this historical break with the modernist rationale, brought on by the downfall of the rehabilitative ideal, led to a crime policy focusing on risk, risk-assessment, and criminogenic situations, producing a policy centring in on territory and geographical aspects of crime. A process strengthened by a what I see as a dualization of the crime problem, furthering a territorial focus of by the idea of protecting either the open society or the civil society.

Keywords: Crime policy, governing, welfare state, territory, Sweden.

Introduction

Over recent decades Swedish crime policy have taken a trajectory that could hardly have been foreseen in the early years of the 1970s. Sweden’s well known liberal crime policy has been replaced by tough on crime policies, demands for more police, stiffer penalties, and inescapable prisons.^[2] The criminological mainstream answer is to regard this as a turnout of right-wing policy.^[3] However, this article seeks to analyse these changes in a historical Swedish setting – whereby a social democratic hegemony can’t easily be dismissed. The argument in this article is that changes in the historical trajectory of crime policy in Sweden instead should be regarded as the result of a shift in the rationale of governance within the fields of politics in general and crime policy in particular. These changes have served to modify the Swedish state’s self-understanding; moving away from a governance that both generated and assumed the existence of the welfare state and the welfare society, to a situation where the exercise of power takes quite different forms.

The purpose of this article is thus to address the question of how we should understand the transformed Swedish crime policy. Internationally, crime policy changes have been dominated either by materialist or a culturist understanding thereof.^[4] My claim is instead, that when it comes to Sweden, it is a will to re-frame policy and adopting new forms of governance, that is the decisive “cause”. My claim is that this shows itself in crime policy by means of a governance that has shifted from a will to eliminate social problems through social policy to instead coping with problems of public order by means of crime policy. This shift shows itself in that protecting territory has become the principal crime policy problematization as well as the chief policy solution. The governance of the welfare state was inclusive even when it excluded; even the deviant subjects partook in the welfare society by way of this society’s utopian claim. Present-day governance excludes in its attempts to include: in order for some to belong, others must be pushed out. Problems of order are of a different character than social problems; public order may be maintained by removing those who disturb it, whereas social problems are dealt with by relieving those experiencing them; social problems are located within a wider context, whereas public order problems are localised to a specific area.

My argumentation will draw on what I see as Swedish crime policy´s historical break with the modernist rationale due to the downfall of the rehabilitative ideal as an all-encompassing scientific underpinning of policy: This criminological modernity crisis led to a situation in Sweden were the criminological knowledge-production re-focused on risk, risk-assessment, and criminogenic situations, abandoning the search for universalizable causal explanations of a covering law model. Instead, the criminological knowledge has become geographically placed. Pushing this is a historical dualization of the crime problem, placing crime in a territorial focus of either the open society or the civil society. Consequently, we get a politicised knowledge that legitimize crime policy by claims of serving the general public’s will by adjusting policy to the so-called general sense of justice. This process is assisted by a framing of the crime problem as a threat to democracy and what is termed system threatening crimes. The objective of this article will thus also be an attempt to describe the emergence of this altered form of governance within the crime policy field by way of investigating what form of knowledge, conceptions, practices, and power formations this governance comprises.

The article will be disposed in such a way that the first section presents the trajectory of Swedish crime policy since the 1970s to the present day. Section I focuses the crime policy fields production of a new legitimacy due to the downfall of the rehabilitative ideal, thus addressing the appearance of what I have termed the dual crime problem; the invention of both public space and the local community as central elements of governance; concluding with an analysis of “crime as a threat to democracy”. In section II this new governance of territory is analysed.

Section I

In wake of the fall of the great episteme – Swedish crime policy in the 1970’s

Since the introduction of the celled prison in the 1840s, the fundamental epistemological figure in Swedish crime policy was some sort rehabilitative ideal, taking the criminal subject as its point of departure.^[5] All through the first 75 years of the 20^th century all measures taken, whether it was changes in the penal code or prison code, were to further individual preventive effects. The use and/or implementation of new sanctions were done either for the furthering of the criminals’ future behaviour or to uphold a social defence – termed societal protection.

During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, an increasing number of voices started to make themselves heard questioning the effectiveness of these rehabilitative measures and the justice in treating criminals as diseased.^[6] This criticism took two forms. On the one hand there was a legal criticism arguing that the rehabilitative ideal was in conflict with the most fundamental legal principles such as equality before the law, predictability, and the legality and proportionality principles: It was unjust because it involved sanctioning the person and not the act, and thus it was not the seriousness of the crime but rather the state of ill-health of the individual which determined the choice of sanction.^[7] The second form of criticism involved empirical evidence that the measures introduced did not produce any positive effects on crime.^[8] There was no empirical support for rehabilitation and critics questioned the assumption that the causes of crime lay in the pathology of the subject, instead pointing out structural socio-economic factors as more important if one wanted to understand why crimes were committed.^[9] Thus, the rehabilitative ideal was both scientifically unsound and legally unreasonable.

This resulted in the fall of the rehabilitative ideal within criminology, thus abandoning the scientific epistemologies, practices and ideologies that had served to legitimise crime policy for a hundred years and removing it firstly from the scientific and then the political agenda: Tearing down the entire weft of conceptions, assumptions, values, and practices that had constituted the basis for the legitimacy and rationale of crime policy.^[10]

Until the 1970s, crime policy in Sweden had been a relatively apolitical business. It had naturally been political in the elementary sense that it was governed by politicians, but crime policy had not been an area in which political parties had chosen to distinguish themselves from one another. Crime policy had for the most part been guided by a scientific optimism and a faith in scientific solutions.^[11] The critique of the rehabilitative ideal called this into question and showed that it was not the sciences, but rather policy, that had the capacity to deal with the crime problem. This being the case since the crime problem was not caused by pathological disorders at the level of the individual, which could be dealt with by doctors, but by societal conditions. What the research community could do was to call attention to the factors that caused crime, but the task of dealing with these causes was a task for politics.

The critique of the rehabilitative ideal made its breakthrough in Swedish policy at the end of the 1970s. At the same time, following the general election of 1976, the centre-right opposition was able to form a government for the first time in forty years. This new government faced the task of formulating a crime policy without being able to base this on the scientific foundations that had served to legitimise crime policy since the 19th century. The truth of the crime policy debate, particularly on the part of the experts, was that the opportunities available to the Ministry of Justice and the penal system to affect crime were non-existent. What prison might be expected to achieve, for example, was the opposite of a reduction in crime, since the effects of imprisonment nigh on guaranteed relapse into crime. This was accepted within the political sphere, and it was emphasised that “the criticism has in particular noted those experiences which show that placing offenders in prisons consistently leads to a poor level of rehabilitation and a high level of recidivism”.^[12] The research community persevered with the argument that the solution to the crime problem lay in a general increase in levels of welfare and the abolition of class-based divisions.

At the time it was therefore difficult to legitimise and rationalise not just crime policy, but above all the existence of the penal system. Why have a penal system based on prisons, courts, and police if it only produced negative effects? And why pursue a crime policy at all when the solution lay in general welfare policy? The crime problem was a problem for social policy and not for crime policy. If the crime problem was caused by disordered individuals, the state could actively pursue a policy focused on these individuals, which viewed crime in terms of a public health problem, and which could raise children and youths to become good citizens by means of prophylaxis and education, while those who failed to adapt even as adults could be interned for life. But if the crime problem was caused by an inherently unjust society where large parts of the populace were excluded due to class or unfair distribution of means, then the penal system just fortified these causes.

During this process, a policy of prioritisation^[13] was formulated in the context of which politicians argued that certain types of crime were more important to deal with than others. The categories of violent crime, drug crime, economic crime and youth crime were so important that they needed to be prioritised.^[14] What the prioritised offence categories had in common was that their causes were presented in such a way as to give the organs of the penal system a real opportunity to produce a positive effect. Unlike the socio-structural causes that the critics of the rehabilitative ideal had argued were most important; the causal picture presented here was described primarily in terms of a lack of control. Crimes were caused by a lack of police, lax morals, and too few laws. The crime preventive work that the Ministry of Justice and the penal system were supposed to implement was described as being more direct, and as not including social measures, as work that “has to be pursued with the goal of reducing crime constituting a more immediate point of departure and [which] cannot be expanded to include generally aimed measures of a social nature”^[15]. Prioritising certain categories of crime and turning the “correct” measures to combat these primarily into a question of police efforts generated a new rationalization of the penal system.

The dual crime problem and the emergence of the local community

In the mid-1970s, the reduced use of the penal system was regarded as essential in coming to grips with crime as a social problem. Several public inquiries were appointed to examine the possibility of using decriminalisation or reductions in the level of criminalisation as means of lessening the crime problem. The introduction of the policy of prioritisation carried with it the seed for a change in the view of the opportunities available to the penal system to affect the crime problem. The policy of prioritisation meant that criminalisation, recriminalisation and penal system measures appeared to constitute potential solutions to the crime problem. However, additional transformations were required before the crime policy focus of today could emerge, with its emphasis on “serious crime”, and with violent crime constituting its central element.

In present-day Sweden the crime problem is equal to what is framed as “serious crime”, and different types of violent crime, alongside drug crimes, make up the core of a crime problem that is framed as threat to democracy.^[16] From a historical perspective, at least since the French Revolution, property crime has constituted the most important category of offences and has been the type of crime against which reactions have been toughest. Up until the mid-1980s, “real criminals” comprised thieves and safe-breakers, and the stiffest sanctions were reserved for those who made a living from crime. The focus on “serious crime” and the major significance assigned to violent crime has changed this. The question is, what has produced this focus on violent crime?

One key to understanding the emergence of this phenomenon may be found in the political solution chosen to deal with the subject of women assaulted by their male partners. During the 1970s, there emerged a feminist critique of the penal system. This critique was directed at society’s response to and handling of assaults against women, or rather at the lack of such a response.^[17] It focused on the warped nature of the patriarchal society, and assaults on women were viewed as a symptom of gender inequality in society at large. Politics however chose to focus on the fact that perpetrators could walk free if the victim withdrew the charges lodged.^[18] At the time, violent offences fell under private prosecution in Sweden. For the state to prosecute someone for a violent crime, the victim of the crime was required to press charges, and if the victim was unwilling to do so, the charges would be dropped. The political solution thus became the placement of violent crimes under public prosecution. In doing so, what was emphasised as problematic in relation to assaults on women was not that the phenomenon might be a consequence of an unjust patriarchal society, but rather that the state had not had the means to be able to punish the culprits of such crimes. Framing the problem as such thus transformed assaults against women from being a structural, social, and general societal problem of a gendered society into a crime policy problem. Introducing public prosecution was a measure that provided the penal system with greater opportunities to act against violent crime. But it was more than that; the introduction of public prosecution for violent crime meant that the penal system, quite unexpectedly, became the crucial factor in combating the crime problem. A pivotal consequence was also that the introduction of public prosecution led to a substantial increase in the official statistics relating to violent crime, an increase that would come to serve as the primary argument for more penal measures turning crime policy into an even hotter political topic. The increase, however, was not reflected in the victim-surveys on exposure to crime conducted annually by Statistics Sweden.^[19]

When crime policy at the beginning of the 1980s turned its focused on “serious crime”, this move was made to provide legitimacy for the penal system, and it met a need for legitimacy that had arisen due to the fall of the rehabilitative ideal. “Serious crime” was framed as something being so dangerous that it could not be left to “generally aimed measures of a social nature” which had been the policy during what could be termed the penal welfare regime. The political focus on “serious crime” led to a division of the crime problem, since the politics of prioritisation pushed other types of crime into the background of the crime problem, resulting in a division of the crime problem into serious crime and everyday crime. This division has remained to the present day, and if we look at the way “serious crime” has been defined, we find that it is in terms of offences that in some way constitute a threat to the state’s monopoly over the use of violence. By contrast, “everyday crime” comprises those offences to which people are exposed to during their daily lives, in their homes and cars, offences which are managed by means of various forms of insurance.^[20]

The dualisation of the crime problem also involved a reformulation of the responsibility for the crime problem, whereby the (welfare) state reformulated its area of responsibility at the same time as responsibility for certain aspects of the crime problem were transferred to what is now referred to as the local community, consisting primarily of different Swedish municipals.^[21] This process was initiated during the mid-1990s when the Social Democrats reformulated their crime policy programme in relation to the downfall of the rehabilitative ideal by emphasising the importance of community crime prevention at a municipal level, while at the same time stressing an individual responsibility for crime prevention work. This strategy contained both classical conservative images of the way in which society works, as well as neo-liberal notions about civil society and the autonomous, rational individual. The conservative aspects became apparent in an organic description, not only of how society is damaged by crime, but also of the way in which crime may be dealt with by means of a correct upbringing and through schooling into the organic unit that society constitutes, and where the criminal, because of his crime, stands outside of and becomes a threat to society. The neo-liberal ideas emerged in the conception of civil society as a privileged unit comprising individuals who have joined together voluntarily on rational grounds.

Through the dualization of the crime problem, and the thereby advocated solution to the problem, the elements of governance became redefined.^[22] The state thus transforms itself from an entity bearing the entire responsibility for the crime problem as a social problem into an entity that only bears responsibility for the maintenance of order in public space.^[23] The state is thus transmuted from a welfare state into a judicial state and society, by contrast, becomes disengaged from the state and becomes a unit in its own right – the local community. This form of governance differs from the governing rationality of the welfare state, where it was of utmost importance to cluster together the state and society in the form of the welfare state or welfare society.^[24] Through this, Sweden became what is termed a civil society. A shifting of the shape of Swedish policy that is most interesting, since a central criticism of the welfare state was that it was not responsive enough to the needs of civil society.

Splitting the Swedish (welfare) state into a judicial state and adjoining local community involves two different practices of governance; on the one hand there is a process of denial directed at “serious crime” and on the other a process of responsibilisation focused on “everyday crime”.^[25] This process bears a resemblance to what Garland has termed criminologies of the other and criminologies of the self and the associated strategies of symbolic denial and responsibilization.^[26] The denial process Swedish style also comprises a governance whereby the state, by framing the penal system as the solution to “serious crime”, sidesteps the fact that it no longer has an all-encompassing solution to the crime problem. Whereas the responsibilisation process involves shifting responsibility for “everyday crime” onto municipal authorities, the so-called local community, and private individuals and voluntary organisations such as neighbourhood watch projects. However, these altered practices of governance are not unique to crime policy but rather constitute part of a general policy change in Sweden combining an increased political responsibility at the local level via the municipalisation of areas such as schools and the care of the elderly, a policy which conveys a desire for higher levels of private involvement and responsibility for the individual’s own local community. This neo-liberal governance has been pivotal to the social democratic reformulation of the so-called third way policy.^[27] The third way was the Swedish social democrat’s policy-formation due to the downfall of Keynesianism and it started to take form due to the lost general elections of the 1970s. It incorporated a neo-liberal political economy, and I have claimed that crime policy and the responsibilisation process were decisive means in the application of neo-liberalism in Sweden by way of making an individualized responsibility the key solution to everyday crime.^[28] The rational actor that was to prevent crime by keeping control over his or hers property, was likewise to take responsibility over other aspects of life where the paternalism of the welfare state was to be replaced by freedom of choice options such as private health insurance and private pension insurances.

The dualisation of the crime problem and knowledge production

Decisive in Swedish crime policy is a shift in focus transferring the emphasis on the culprit, the criminal, the delinquent, a reformable subject that was to be re-socialized back into society, over to the law-abiding citizen. Present-day crime policy isn’t about reducing crime by means of reforming the criminal, but rather to protect law-abiding citizens by means of increased control, thus the state’s primary obligation is to ensure that serious criminals are not at liberty to commit serious crimes. The knowledge and rationale underpinning this is not a scientific knowledge, but rather a political knowledge. The fall of the rehabilitative ideal also brought about a new political “knowledge” based on what is referred to as the public’s general sense of justice.^[29] Instead of basing the legitimacy of crime policy on its crime reduction abilities, crime policy is instead legitimised by an appeal to what politicians claim to be citizens’ demands and expectations there upon. This has shown itself to be a strength, politicians now choose freely from among the available knowledge to legitimise their opinions, or simply dismiss knowledge by reference to the public’s sense of justice. By keeping its finger on the pulse of “public perceptions” politics can access another form of knowledge on crime policy then that produced by the experts’ statistical analyses of crime trends. Thus, crime policy tends to be underpinned by a political knowledge independent of experts.

Looking instead at the criminological knowledge production since the fall of the rehabilitative ideal, the focus is on so-called everyday crime neglecting the aetiology of so-called serious crime. Criminology has since the 1970s abandoned any substantial claims to aetiology, turning instead either to social control issues or to questions relating to the opportunity structures of crime.^[30] This is probably due to criminology´s historical inability to do correct predictions. However, criminology seems to have constructed a new base for criminological knowledge to replace the modernist scientific optimism – risk analysis.

Risk analysis – a new episteme

The modernistic scientific ideal embraced by proponents of the rehabilitative ideal, involving universal, causal, and objective explanations, came during the 1980s and 90s in Sweden to be replaced by a risk mentality. The risk mentality is in itself nothing new but can rather be seen as an integrated aspect of the modern. Robert Castel describes the risk mentality as something which removes the need for knowledge about the concrete subject and replaces it with knowledge about multiple factors in the form of risk factors.^[31] During the 18^th and 19^th century, a project was begun to comprehensively chart everything to do with humanity and her environment by means of statistics.^[32] Within this project the risk mentality had been lying latent ever since. There is a decisive difference, however, between using collected statistics in order to develop causal explanatory models and using them descriptively for the purposes of risk analyses. If one is only looking for correlations no causes are required and thus no theories. Looking for causes, by contrast, involves looking for factors besides the correlated variables that must be found and charted if one really wants to get to grips with a problem, since “(d)angers have causes that need to be tackled and ultimately removed. But risks do not call for elimination; they need to be, and can be, managed”.^[33]

The utilization of the risk mentality correspondingly involved a shift in the way the disciplinary process was applied. The disciplinary process is not about creating “slaves”, but rather self-reliant citizens, capable of conducting themselves in a civilised manner in a context of liberal freedom.^[34] The treatment ideology had its basis in the disciplinary process, and as Pasquale Pasquino has shown, for example, the theories of social hygiene that were developed during the 19th century involved adapting the penalty to fit the offender and not the crime.^[35] Social hygiene had the objective of fostering the good citizen and was thereby a tool of the disciplinary process. Roy Boyne argues that the discipline of today goes beyond the subject and the bodies of the population and instead involves the geographical space in which we spend our time.^[36] This fits well with the criminological knowledge that has emerged since the 1970s. This knowledge involves no attempts to explain and understand the underlying causes of crime. Instead, it primarily takes the form of the charting of risk based on descriptive statistics, a search for statistical correlations that point to criminogenic situations or hot spots to avoid.

Situational crime prevention (SCP) seems to be the most obvious proponent of this risk criminology. SCP consist of reducing the number of criminal opportunities, or in other words, changing the criminal opportunity structure.^[37] By using descriptive statistics the aim is to target situations associated with high levels of risk and control these risks. This has led to a situation where: `(t)he theories that now shape official thinking and action are control theories of various kinds that deem crime and delinquency to be problems not of deprivation but of inadequate controls´.^[38] Thus, crimes arise because of deficient controls, and crime prevention is no longer a task for a social policy aiming at resolving social problem. Crime becomes framed as something unavoidable and crime prevention thus becomes a case of risk management and risk control; permeated by a logic that `(o)ne does not start from a conflictual situation observable in experience, rather one deduces from a general definition of the dangers one wishes to prevent. These preventive policies thus promote a new mode of surveillance: that of systematic pre-detection´.^[39]

Swedish crime policy as risk assessment

Risk analysis as an epistemological figure became the rationale of Swedish crime policy during the 1980s by shifting the focus to the so-called criminal opportunity structure.^[40] Nonetheless, it has not had the same effect at the state level as that of the so-called local community level. At the municipal level risk assessment has come to inform the responsibilisation process by way of visualizing risks. First and foremost, it involves the generalized risk located in the individual responsibility manifested in the prudent citizen.^[41] Everyday crimes, such as break-ins, are nowadays handled via insurances. Risk analysis, however, has come to be applicable to a great many aspects of the everyday life of the populace due to the deregulation of economy and the downscaling of the welfare state. Consequently, individualised risk assessment permeates everything from pension plans, health, employability to private social insurances, thus the risk mentality constitutes a precondition for the emergence of the new civic subject, the prudent citizen, a subject who takes on responsibility both for his/her own life and for that of others, replacing the state and social insurance.^[42]

In crime policy it is the all-out embracement of situational crime prevention and the routine activity theory that really manifests the logic of risk analysis in Sweden, and the entire reasoning of the Swedish crime prevention council draws on this logic. The new law of 2023 that makes it mandatory for Swedish municipals to do preventive work also make the risk-reasoning of situational crime prevention and the routine activity theory into obligatory.^[43] But risk-analysis and so-called risk factors also permeate the preventive work done by the social services regarding youths committing crime.^[44]

Historically questions concerning crime policy seem not to have made it onto the agenda of the Swedish voter, and studies have shown that from the late 1970s up to the beginning of the 2000s the question never really caught on, but in the 2022 general election crime policy emerged as one of the most important questions for the electorate.^[45] Any causal relationship between the populace interest in crime policy and risk as an epistemological figure would be hard to prove, but it seems plausible that risk has changed our understanding of the crime problem.^[46] Risk analysis has transformed the local community into a crime-prune arena, and one important lesson for the prudent citizen is the `fact´ that crime arises as a result of a lack of control and can be rectified with the aid of better locks and neighbourhood watch schemes.^[47] Relating to crime on the basis of an understanding of how crimes may be avoided allows the populace to attain an overview of a world that seems to be filled to the brim with crime and other dangers. Risk also enables inhabitants to relate to their surroundings firstly by distinguishing `those who commit crime´, not in terms of specific individuals, but in terms of them perceived as the threats and the risks. Secondly, `our´ neighbourhood take shape through an understanding of neighbours as either prudent, taking potential risks into consideration, or as non-prudent, failing to do so. Through the application of risk analyses and risk management the local community emerges as an area of (self)governance making it all about who belong in `our´ neighbourhood and who do not.^[48]

The open society – crime as a threat to democracy

In the Swedish post-welfare state the state’s crime policy mission has been framed as the maintaining of peace in public space. Risk assessment is also here the essential epistemological outlook. Yet, risk here is a means of making symbolic denial into a rational crime policy, i.e., by transforming penal system measures into a reasonable way of combating `serious crime´. The conception of risk at this level involve the risks of not providing enough prison sentences, police and surveillance measures, since the objective of crime policy is here that of protecting what is now referred to as `the open society´.^[49] The protection of a fictitious general public has become the new basis of legitimacy for crime policy and public space must be kept open and free from crime in order for public access to this space to be secured. This has led to the crime problem being portrayed not merely as a temporary disturbance of the social order but as something much greater. The crime problem has consequently since the mid-1990s often been portrayed as a threat to democracy and to `the open society´.

Crime as a threat to democracy may be understood in two ways. Firstly, it relates to the state’s monopoly over the use of violence, the very existence of which is placed under threat by `serious crime´ since these crimes threaten the state’s capacity to provide the security in the Hobbesian sense. However simple this description may be, when the legitimacy of the welfare state no longer seems tenable, maintaining order and providing security in public space becomes the state’s dividing line, and the identifier of the limits of state power. Consequently, when `serious crime´ is to be combated by means of a sovereign power, the local community becomes the arena in charge of creating social meaning.^[50] This can be understood as a transition from a social engineering perspective to a moral engineering perspective^[51], manifesting itself when crime prevention is described as a process of moral fostering which is to `… impart to the young those norms and values that belong in a civilised society´.^[52]

The second way to conceive of crime as a threat to democracy arises within the local community. Here it threatens the solidarity and reciprocity that is to prevail within social space, and since the state no longer has any intentions of stepping in and compensating for injustices that arise in terms of allocation and reciprocity, crime becomes a threat to the equilibrium that must prevail in social space if it is to be characterised by solidarity. In Durkheimian terms this de-evolution of (local) society could be seen as bringing forth a mechanical solidarity more prune to punitiveness. But since local communities at the same time become their own cure, they are also brought `… into alliance with the individualized ethos of neo-liberal politics: choice, personal responsibility, control over one’s own fate, self-promotion and self-government´.^[53] Avoiding crime is the pay-off for the individual prudent citizen, whereas punishing the criminal strengthen solidarity and thus works as pay-off to all law-abiding citizens.

Part II

A transformation of policy

I will now turn to the point I want to make concerning how we should understand the transformed Swedish crime policy. My claim is that the decisive `cause´ when it comes to Sweden is a political will to re-frame policy and adopting new forms of governance brought on by the will to win elections, and not material aspects or cultural changes in the mentality^[54] towards the Swedish welfare state.^[55] This change in policy shows itself in that social policy is replaced by crime policy by means of a governance that has shifted from a will to eliminate social problems through social policy to instead coping with problems of public order by means of crime policy. This shift shows itself in that protecting territory has become the principal crime policy problematization as well as the chief policy solution.

From an including exclusion to a excluding inclusion

During the hight of the Swedish welfare state in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, the disciplinary process was an important element in the administration of the population and crime policy constituted an essential instrument of reform by means of social engineering.^[56] The immanent objective of the disciplinary process was the reintegration of the deviant subject, meaning that some form of inclusion into society was the endpoint of the process. This was an exclusory form of inclusion, with the deviant being freed-up by means of scientific knowledge to be corrected and normalized and thereafter reintroduced to the fold. The disciplinary process took as its point of departure the mouldable subject, with deviance constituting a symptom of an illness, a manifestation of the fact that there was a problem; thus, deviance was not in itself the problem. Deviance became a marker that guided the exercise of power, and discipline had the objective of producing the normalized citizen.

That present-day Swedish governance should be understood as having a territorial focus is because the management of deviance no longer seem to be characterised by the same population-focused pedagogic intentions. Governance is today about inclusion, and it is the prudent citizens that are sought after. However, this inclusion does not work in the same way as the inclusive exclusion of the welfare society. Inclusion today instead functions by excluding, and the disciplining effects of deviance do not lie in the creation of solidarity by restoring the deviant to the flock, but rather through the creation of solidarity by showing how deviants don´t belong and should be excluded from society. This can be exemplified by means of the discussions that have been conducted on the design of security institutions, the proposed introduction of a “super-prison” and the shifts associated with the concept of protecting society. Until 1981, Swedish law allowed for the possibility of interning subjects who were deemed to be particularly disposed to reoffending in the name of défense social. However, release from prison was still possible and the function of the indeterminate sanction was simply that it made it possible to return culprits to prison without having to go through a court trial when new crimes were committed. Present-day penal policy debates also address the question of societal protection, but these discussions totally lack the question of re-integrating criminal into society after they served their sentences.^[57] Arguments for societal protection thus has shifted from the biopolitical focus of protecting the society in terms of the populace, becoming instead a question of protecting the law-abiding citizens right to a safe territory.

A qualified citizenship

The citizen of the Swedish welfare state was a subject that was a part of a large-scale governance project that involved the biopolitical administration of the population as that which constituted the nation state. The qualified citizenship that governance addresses today has its origins in the local community – and you qualify for this citizenship by means of the responsibilisation process whereby you create yourself as a prudent citizen who can meet the demands of an individualised responsibility. What we get is a governance based on the premiss that `(t)he citizens must be given autonomy in order, both alone and in various types of joint self-administration, to themselves regulate their lives to the greatest possible extent´.^[58] Moral engineering as a disciplining process is visualized by framing the preservation of `the open society´ as a moral quest. And since `the days when there was a belief that the policy one was conducting was morally neutral and had a scientific basis are now gone´^[59] we need to be clear about the moral dimensions of policy. Order arises and is maintained by means of exclusion, and the micro-power applied is based on a conservative organic understanding of the world in which the art of moral engineering can correct faults via a fostering of young deviants; at least until a criminal identity has become established and an exclusion is unavoidable if we want to maintain order.^[60] The logic of inclusion consequently involves the exclusion of subjects who have failed in their duty to curb their urges and to develop their civic virtue. The public space that the state sees it as its duty to maintain is given the form of a marketplace and the populace becomes consumer in this post-political order where politics becomes providing customer satisfaction. Moral condemnation of the criminal has become a central part of Swedish crime policy, and the moralism Wendy Brown terms as antipolitics seem to be all to present in a Swedish context.^[61]

Looking out on a threatening world

Swedish crime policy was from the early 1900s to the 1980s conducted via institutions like the mental asylum, the prison, the borstal, and the school. These institutes of reform were placed in a hierarchical relation of distance to `normal society´. The prisons and borstals were located outside of the towns, the mental hospitals were placed on their outskirts, whereas hospitals and schools were accommodated in the centre of town. The correction of the deviant subject was for the most part undertaken in institutions. The criticism directed at the rehabilitative ideal was part of a general critique of the Swedish welfare state’s use of forced institutional treatment, and other areas such as the institutional practice of psychiatry was also affected.^[62] The critique led to a de-institutionalisation which resulted in psychiatry, amongst other things, being conducted in the out-patient sector.^[63] Rose describes how old, Victorian mental hospitals have been converted into homes for the better-off, with the walls that were originally built to keep the insane locked-in now being used instead to keep them out. In Växjö, Sweden, the former prison has been transformed to luxury condominiums. The insane, as well as other deviants, are now out on the streets, and the cities are assuming forms whose objective is to protect the cities and their inhabitants against these persons. In Sweden, de-institutionalisation has had a substantial number of visible effects, and the homeless that, since the mid-1990s, can be seen on the streets of Stockholm include former clients of psychiatric institutions. The transition from social problems to problems of public order also manifests itself clearly in this area. Homeless persons begging on the subway system in Stockholm are dealt with not as a social problem, but as a public order problem. A few diverse measures are being implemented to prevent begging, not in terms of the provision of economic or social assistance, but rather in terms of the use of security staff to remove the beggars. A further example of the threat presented by these deviants emerged when Stockholm suffered a few `acts of insanity´ over the course of a relatively short period of time including, amongst other things, the murder of the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in 2003. Images of perceived threats were produced, including a claim that the Stockholm subway system was hiding 20,000 ticking time-bombs in the form of mentally ill `madmen´ who were just waiting to explode in the commission of further acts of insanity. The de-institutionalisation of the Swedish (welfare) state seems to, alongside what Ingrid Sahlin has termed a control paradigm in crime prevention, have contributed to what may be seen an inverted panopticism.^[64] Instead of locking people up and subjecting them to surveillance, we lock ourselves in and look out on a world where the lack of public order is disquieting.

The city and the local community as fortifications

A large proportion of the criminological knowledge applied in present-day Swedish crime policy is focused on the development of various risk-management models whose objective is to influence the criminogenic situation.^[65] In this area we find such theories as that of defensible space and crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED).^[66] Implicit in these ideas, there is also what I conceive as a changed principle of distribution, evading exposure to crime is consequently something one earns by systematically working to maintain one’s own defensible space.

In the logic of situated crime prevention, the local community gets materialized in ways similar to the fortified cities of the Middle Ages, or the stockaded forts of the wild west. Emerging from this is a closed community, safeguarded by a stockade, where physical space is reserved for those who belong. The local community is linked to the state only by means of insecure passages through which one moves at constant risk. A classic example of this post-welfare community can be found in Ärvinge outside Stockholm. Ärvinge has been designed based on the CPTED ideal.^[67] If one reads what police and academics have written about Ärvinge and other similar areas a fortification mentality is obvious. `Phenomena that serve as territorial markers may be produced by means of symbolic obstacles such as doorways, gates, hedges, fencing or flowerpots. In this way one accentuates for outsiders that they are entering a more private area´. Ärvinge has been designed like a series of fortifications in the battle against `everyday crime´. And just as was the case when the construction of fortifications comprised one of the foremost arts of war, it is once again territory that is central.

Tenant-owners’ housing associations are coming to constitute an increasingly common form of local community in Sweden’s metropolitan areas. One major problem is that these lie as fortified communities in an otherwise `war-torn´ environment and travelling between secure territories is a risk-filled journey involving a constant threat of meaningless street violence, rape, and mugging. The distance between the subway and the home has itself become particularly problematic in many areas of Stockholm and by way of a solution, tenant-owners’ housing associations (as in Kista) or housing companies (as in Fisksätra) have hired in security staff in increasing numbers to protect residents as they make the journey to and from the subway on foot. In principle, security staff have to an increasing extent come to take over the task of providing protection in the passages of insecurity that link together the local communities with public space. Not only this, however; security staff are also increasingly being employed to protect the stockades around various protected territories such as shopping malls, and public communications.

Territory at the local level crystallises not only through protection and control but also by means of a perspective of nostalgia. The nostalgic images portrayed in political texts relate to a communal solidarity, to informal control, neighbourhood watch and local crime prevention councils; the local community as an organic unit where people have joined together of their own volition, a community where everyone has an interest in working towards the same goal since everybody shares the same values. The Swedish local police reform of the 1990s was also motivated by reference to this same perspective of nostalgia; the dream was of police, clothed in a representation of the classical county sheriff, who would patrol the streets of the community and spread feelings of control, order, safety, and warmth.^[68]

Sweden’s major cities are also being re-designed on the basis of a fortification mentality. In Stockholm as elsewhere, ideas about designing away crime have had an impact. The conception involved is that of fixing broken windows, an idea that preventing the deterioration of public space will prevent disagreeable elements from wanting to spend time there, and that decent, honourable citizens will instead take over this public space. This also involves a general `freshening up´ of town centres at large. Over the past decades, Stockholm has been `freshened up´ and public places such as walkways have been spruced up while areas regarded as having become slum-like have been removed. Opinions are even being voiced that some of the suburbs of Stockholm should be torn down.^[69]

The design of the city appears to have come to be more about protecting and maintaining zones of safety than about a direct surveyability. The surveyability of the city in relation to the prevalence of its less desirable elements was developed by the early moral scientists and constituted part of the population-focused project that has now been abandoned. The sociological and criminological `surveys´ of today are not focused overall, but rather on parts, on locating `crime hot spots´ specific `areas of vulnerability´ which will then be able to be subjected to controls. Here once again we find an example of the way in which the art of social engineering has been replaced by that of moral engineering. The social engineer needed knowledge about the individual subject to be able to correct this subject; an overview was required in order to be able to apply the scientific instrument. The moral engineer merely needs to know where the threats and risks are located in order to know how they are to be removed, isolated or excluded. When Boverket, the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, tries to define safety the individual’s interpretation of the physical environment becomes of outmost importance:

Safety is the feeling that is triggered when the individual interprets the design and use of a physical environment by combining sensory impressions with their own experiences as well as with other individuals' or media's descriptions of the risk of being exposed to crime or threatening situations.^[70]

The search for safety in the public room has also witnessed the emergence of an expansive security market, including amongst other things the use of closed-circuit TV surveillance. The public transport operator in Stockholm (Storstockholms lokaltrafik - SL) is investing in surveillance cameras, which are viewed as an excellent tool for creating security. Security is something that should not be limited and SL `… do not accept that the protection of individual integrity should be assigned more weight than the right to preserve pictures in order to be able to follow-up and identify vandals. We know from customer surveys that our passengers are very accepting of the use of surveillance measures.´ SL also encourages citizens to report non-criminal acts that create `insecurity´, so `if you should feel unsafe on an SL service … you can dial 600 10 00´.^[71]

In the context of these processes, we can also discern an altered role for the police: the role of `knowledge workers´. Ärvinge constitutes an example of what is referred to as `knowledge-based police work´. In the case of Ärvinge and in relation to the different local communities `who want to make use of the knowledge available from this source´, the police portray themselves as consultants. How can crime be built out of existence? Visit the police website and you’ll find out. Much of the research that is being conducted under the guise of police research, including situational crime prevention, CPTED and other ecological theories, is conducted at police colleges. The work of producing knowledge is emphasised and the use of crime mapping, to take one example, is described as `... an investigative tool that helps the police to make the right priorities, such as which area and which perpetrators should be kept under surveillance´. At the same time, the police too seem to want to assume the profitable position of security personnel and to be able to accept payment for their surveillance operations.^[72] When criticisms are made that security officers are taking over an increasing amount of the work of the police, however, the question of competence is put forward as a defence: `we will be focusing on working with the knowledge, skills and powers that are unique to us within the police. ... We will be placing a high value on our own professionalism and will be putting our resources where they will produce the greatest benefits´.

Another understanding of how territory informs crime policy can be found in the concept of vulnerable area (utsatt områden), a term that the Swedish police started using in 2015 to describe suburbs and neighborhoods with a low socio-economic status and with what the police saw as a criminal impact on the local community.^[73] The police divided these suburbs into vulnerable areas, risk areas and particularly vulnerable areas, and according to the same a total of 61 areas are “afflicted”, made up by 28 vulnerable areas, 14 risk areas and 19 particularly vulnerable areas. Population wise some 566,000 people, or 5.4 percent of Sweden’s population lives in one of these areas, and 200,000 people or 2.0 percent of the population lives in particularly vulnerable areas. Vulnerable areas are defined as places where public acts of violence occur that risk harming third parties, drug trafficking appears openly and there is an outspoken dissatisfaction with the Swedish society. Particularly vulnerable areas are defined in terms of place where there exist what the police frame as parallel social structures, a place where extremism, in terms of systematic violations of religious freedom or fundamentalist view, limits people's freedoms and rights. A place that displays a high concentration of criminals.^[74] It is a bleak picture that the police paint:

For the Police Authority, vulnerable areas have special challenges, not only in terms of serious and organized crime. A culture of silence whereby criminals effect citizens, lower trust in the police and the judiciary, and the recruitment of young people into criminal groups, makes it difficulties for the police to prevent and investigate crime.^[75]

Parallel to this opinionmakers have tried to establish the concept of “No-Go-Zones” in the public understanding of these suburbs.^[76] The use of this military slang portraits some Swedish suburbs as unsecure areas controlled by rebels and thus as threats to the sovereignty of the Swedish state. In the lectures leading up to Punishment and Society Michel Foucault used the idea of civil war to understand how the punitive society evolved, making civil war the default-setting of social relations.^[77] Contrary to the Hobbesian notion of war of all against all or the Marxist understanding of social order in terms of class struggle, civil war for Foucault becomes the genesis of imprisonment as a power-formation.^[78] The punitive society is thus a power-formation that is best understood as a civil war conducted against unwanted parts of society. Looking at present-day depiction of Sweden as a nation torn apart by crime, harboring areas that are so crime-prone that they are No-Go-Zones, crime policy take the guise of a civil war that can’t be lost and the politically proposed temporary and mobile visitation-zones, where the use of body search and house search in vehicles is no longer dependent of a suspicion of crime, becomes an obvious means to an end – defending the nations territory by way of controlling them going to or coming from vulnerable areas. The latest political answer to the problem of territory is the implementation of a national census.^[79] The object of this census is among other things, that the states need to know who lives in the country, i.e., them living in the so-called vulnerable areas, but also as a means of combatting so-called welfare crimes, i.e., the misuse of social insurances. It is the areas deemed as at risk or vulnerable that are to be specifically targeted and bio-metrical means of identification is to be used.

The ethnical aspect is here more than obvious and since the 2010 general election, an election that saw the nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, take seats in the parliament, the political focus on immigration has come to permeate most political debates in general and crime policy debate in particular. The conservatives gave up their liberal immigration policy when losing the election in 2014, a liberal policy based primarily on the hope that immigration would push wages downwards, thus dissolving the Swedish labor market. The conservative government that came to power in the election in 2022 is wholly dependent on the support of the Sweden democrats, and no policy or reform is pushed through parliament without their support. Consequently, reducing immigration is the solution to every conceivable problem, and repatriation is now a viable crime policy solution. During the fall of 2023 the social democrats published several reports where they made some kind of public avowal concerning their part in what is now generally seen as Sweden’s failed immigration policy.^[80] The territory of Sweden is reserved for ethnical Swedes, and immigrants willing to assimilate, and upholding the territory is done by combating crime.

Concluding remarks

The foundation of the home is commonality and empathy. A good home knows no privileged or disadvantaged, no favoritism, and no stepchildren. In a good home no one looks down on the other, no one tries to gain an advantage at the expense of others, and the strong does not oppress and plunder the weak. In a good home there is equality, consideration, cooperation, helpfulness.^[81]

With these words, the social democratic prime minster Per-Albin Hansson (1885-1946) launched the vision of the social democratic welfare state, a welfare state that was set in place after the social democratic turn to power in 1932. Central to this project was the notion of building a people’s home, the Folkhemmet. Folkhemmet was a way for the social democrats to envision a nationalistic socialism forced on them by the downfall of international socialism brought on by the first world war. Folkhemmet was the welfare state and the practises of social engineering through an excluding inclusion that was intended to bring the strays back to the herd. Folkhemmet was thus the Swedish state’s visualization of itself. The reformulated state that I claim is set in motion by means of crime policy visualizes itself in a very different way, and this `self-understanding´ becomes pivotal in understanding crime policy. This self-understanding is not a cultural change in terms of a public loss in belief in the welfare state, nor is due to changed material circumstances brought on by a neo-liberal means of production, instead it is a political practice, a way of structuring the field of possible actions, that frames the world in a very distinctive way. Playing out crime policy on the territorial level makes for the possibility to frame the world in such a way that it becomes conceivable to govern by protecting the nation by means of excluding those who do not belong. Governing by means of territory rationalizes a crime policy that is about protecting the law-abiding citizen. The progressive and reform-driven welfare state that aimed at building the peoples home has been replaced by a reactive and reactionary juridical state that has lost sight of the future in its obsession of protecting those who belong by means of excluding and combatting them deemed as threats.

[1] This article is based on different works of mine on Swedish crime policy. See for example Robert Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen {The Essence of Crime policy} (Diss: Stockholm University 2002), Robert Andersson, `The Downfall of the Rehabilitative Ideal and the Establishing of a new Political Legitimacy in Swedish Crime Policy 1965 to 1989´, Bergen Journal of Criminal Law & Criminal Justice. 5(2), 2017. Pp. 108-130, or Robert Andersson & Roddy Nilsson, Svensk Kriminalpolitik {Swedish Crime Policy}, (Liber 2017).

[2] Similar crime policy trajectories have been analysed and discussed among Anglo-Saxon researchers. For a comprehensive discussion see Nicola Lacey, The Prisoners' Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[3] Many crime policy studies in Sweden focus on party politics and see as explanation a right-wing turn were the conservative party somehow pushes and drives the social democrats in a repressive direction. See Robert Andersson, ´Från behandling till hårdare tag?: En kritisk analys av högervågsargumentet inom svensk kriminalpolitik´, Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab. 106 (1). Pp. 19-36.

[4] Lacey, The prisoners' dilemma.

[5] This Ideal was based on a faith in the capacity of the sciences, in collaboration with the good and strong state, to resolve social problems. These conceptions had their golden age in the crime policy arena during the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s, when proposals were made in several countries that penal sanctions should be determined by doctors and psychiatrists and not lawyers. The sanction was to be adapted to suit the illness of the offender and was not to be determined by factors such as guilt, intent, or responsibility. Allowing court proceedings to revolve around guilt and responsibility was irrational and uncivilised since criminals were sick individuals in need of care.

[6] Many now seen as prominent scholars in Nordic criminology made their entrance on the scene as critics of the rehabilitative ideal, amongst them the most renowned was Nils Christe.

[7] Eg. Sten Heckscher (ed.), Straff och rättfärdighet: ny nordisk debatt. (Norstedt, 1980).

[8] Eg. Ulla Bondeson, Fången i fångsamhället: socialisationsprocesser vid ungdomsvårdsskola, ungdomsfängelse, fängelse och internering. (Diss. Lund : University, 1974).

[9] The criticism was also ideologically influenced by the left-wing currents that were strong within the social sciences of the time. The argument was made that crime policy and the penal system was an expression of a class-based society whereby members of the lumpenproletariat were locked away for long periods because they had been diagnosed as being sick. Eg. Göran Elwin, Alvar Nelson & Sten Heckscher, Den första stenen: studiebok i kriminalpolitik, (Tiden, 1971).

[10] For a similar description of event in Anglo-Saxon countries see David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, (Oxford University Press, 2001).

[11] Andersson & Nilsson, Svensk kriminalpolitik, ch. 3.

[12] Government Bill 1979/80:100, p. 13.

[13] Due to the so-called oil-crisis of the 1970s a policy of prioritization became a general solution the fiscal problems in Sweden, this spilled over on crime policy. But more importantly, this policy of prioritization called in question the public sector through which the Swedish welfare state was manifested. Abandoning a Keynesian reasoning adopting instead a neo-liberal economic rationale transformed the welfare producing public sector from a provider of benefits to a consumer of taxes, from a resource to a problem. Eg. Stefan Svallfors, Vem älskar välfärdsstaten?: attityder, organiserade intressen och svensk välfärdspolitik, (Diss. Umeå : University, 1981).

[14] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 122-125

[15] Gov.bill 1980/81:100, p. 11-12.

[16] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 179-81.

[17] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 123-26.

[18] Gov.bill 1981/81:43.

[19] Placing violent crime under public prosecution meant that an incident that came to the knowledge of the police was reported into the official statistics, thus what it resulted in was an increase in reported crimes.

[20] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 128-130. For a comprehensive analysis of violent crime in Sweden in a historical perspective, see Hanns von Hofer, Brott och straff i Sverige: historisk kriminalstatistik 1750-2010 : diagram, tabeller och kommentarer, (Stockholm, 2011).

[21] Robert Andersson & Paula Wahlgren, `Local crime prevention work: cultivating a political profile at a municipal level´, Crime Prevention and Community Safety, 24 (2022), p.78-92.

[22] The ideals of monetarism replaced Keynesianism as the rationale of governing in the early 1980s, and the welfare state came under criticism for being expensive and unproductive. This change of governance, however, was not forced on the social democrats by material circumstances, but a conscious choice. This shift however seems to be a response to the leftist critique of the paternalistic welfare evolving from the so-called new left and the 68-movement. Martin Wiklund, I det modernas landskap: historisk orientering och kritiska berättelser om det moderna Sverige mellan 1960 och 1990, (Diss. Lund university, 2006). The critique of the rehabilitative ideal in Sweden was also a critique of the social democratic welfare state, and a state that was framed as repressive, paternalistic and upholder of a class society. Andersson, `The Downfall of the Rehabilitative Ideal.

[23] The framing of the present-day problem of the shootings amongst so called criminal gangs is entirely done in terms these shootings being a threat against public order.

[24] Roger Qvarsell, `Den svenska välfärdens idéhistoria 1967-2017´, in Hans Swärd (ed.), Den kantstötta välfärden, (Studentlitteratur, 2017).

[25] Freedom of choice has been the argument behind the deregulation of the so-called welfare sector (including schooling, health care, care of the elderly) that has been going on since the mid-1980s, deregulations that fit well with the logic of the responsibilisation process whereby citizens are to assume greater personal responsibility not just concerning crime, but also health, pension-planning etc. mainly by private insurances.

[26] David Garland, `The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society`, British Journal of Criminology, 36(4), (1996) p. 445-471.

[27] Jenny Andersson, Between growth and security: Swedish social democracy from a strong society to a third way (Manchester university press, 2006).

[28] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen.

[29] Studies show that there really isn’t anything that can be called a general sense, and the fact is that people tend to have a rather scant knowledge regarding crime and the punishments assigned to these crimes. Cf. Kristina Jerre, The public's sense of justice in Sweden - a smorgasbord of opinions, (Diss. Stockholm university, 2013).

[30] What we see in Sweden is a staggering will to use neuropsychiatric diagnoses to explain crime. ADHD is the most common diagnosis used and claims are being made that up to 50 per cent of the Swedish prison population suffer from it. See Robert Andersson, `A blessing in disguise - The ADHD-diagnoses and Swedish correctional treatment policy in the 21st century´, in Thomas Ugelvik & Jane Dullum (eds.), Penal exceptionalism? Nordic prison policy and practice, (Routledge, 2012).

[31] Robert Castel, `From dangerousness to risk´, in Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Peter Miller, (eds.), The Foucault Effect, (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991).

[32] Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[33] Mathieu Deflem, `Surveillance and Criminal Statistics: Historical Foundations of Governmentality´, Pp. 149-184 in Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey (eds.), Studies in Law, Politics and Society, 17(1997).

[34] Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, (Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 242.

[35] Pasquale Pasquino, `Criminology: The birth of a special knowledge´, in Burcell et al (eds.), The Foucault Effect.

[36] Roy Boyne, `Post-Panopticism´, Economy and Society, 29(3), p.285-307, p. 291.

[37] In Ronald Clarke’s presentation of situational crime prevention, the argument is made that criminological research has been too unilaterally focused on examining the causes underlying the commission of crime. Thus, attempts to find general causal factors are futile and `… a general `theory of crime´ would be almost as crude as a general “theory of disease”´. Ronald Clarke, `Situational crime prevention: Theory and practice´, British Journal of Criminology, 20(2), p. 136-147, p. 137.

[38] Garland, The Culture of Control, p. 15.

[39] Castel, ‘From dangerousness to risk’, p. 288.

[40] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 183.

[41] This view that crime is a common responsibility amongst all citizens is strongly emphasised in the government report A common responsibility (DsJu 1996:59.) and restated again in Tillsammans mot brott (skr. 2016/17:126).

[42] Rose, Powers of Freedom, p. 159.

[43] Lag om kommuners ansvar för brottsförebyggande arbete, (SfS 2023:196).

[44] Christina Söderberg, Att skapa mening i en komplex praktik: föreställningar om brottspreventiva samverkansformer mellan omsorg och kontroll, (Diss.: Linköping university, 2023).

[45] Felix Andersson, Marie Demker, Caroline Mellgren & Patrick Öhberg, `Kriminalpolitik – Inte lika hett som man kan tro´, In Ulrika Andersson, Anders Carlander, Patrik Öhberg & Marie Grusell (eds.), Ingen anledning till oro (?): SOM-undersökningen 2020, (SOM-institutet, 2021).

[46] Ingrid Sahlin describes how what she sees as a control model for crime prevention now dominates Swedish preventive work. Ingrid Sahlin, Brottsprevention som begrepp och samhällsfenomen, (Arkiv, 2000).

[47] The difference between the conception of the crime problem of the welfare society and that of the local community are telling. During the welfare society it was a social problem and as such the state assumed responsibility. In the local community, crime, or at least everyday crime, is the responsibility of the individual, a responsibility shared with other prudent citizens.

[48] Andersson & Wahlgren, `Local crime prevention work´.

[49] It’s of outmost interest that a social democratic prime minister made use of this Popperian choice of words.

[50] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen, p. 157

[51] Kevin Stenson & Robert Sullivan, R. (eds)., Crime, Risk and Justice: The Politics of Crime Control in Liberal Democracies, (Willan, 2001), p. 23.

[52] The Governments Budget Bill 1993/94:100, p. 61.

[53] Rose, Powers of Freedom, p. 249.

[54] The support for and belief in the Swedish welfare state is strong. See for example: Stefan Svallfors, `Who loves the Swedish welfare state? Attitude trends 1980-2010´, in Jon Pierre, (ed.) The Oxford handbook of Swedish politics, (Oxford University Press, 2016).

[55] As early as the 1930s the social democrats concluded that they would not be able to stay in power merely based on a class vote, and thus needed to appeal to middle class voters. Vining the middle-class voter has since then been a prioritized policy. Per Dannefjord, Organisationspraktiker och målförändring: exemplet svensk socialdemokrati, (Arkiv förlag, 2009).

[56] Roddy Nilsson, Från cellfängelse till beteendeterapi: fängelse, kriminalpolitik och vetande 1930-1980, (Égalité, 2013). Andersson & Nilsson, Svensk kriminalpolitik.

[57] Dir 2023:115, En översyn av straffskalorna samt ett reformerat och mer rättvist påföljdssystem.

[58] SOU 2000:1, En uthållig demokrati: politik för folkstyret på 2000-talet, p. 20.

[59] SOU 2000:1, p. 17.

[60] The planned re-introduction of a youth-prison seem to imply that `our´ view here has sharpened. The youth-prison was abolished in 1979 due to its complete failure, but now a public inquiry argues for its return. But whereas rehabilitation was the purpose of the former youth prison, incapacitation, and secure confinement are the argument behind the potential re-introduction. SOU 2023:44, En översyn av regleringen om frihetsberövande påföljder för unga.

[61] Andersson & Nilsson, Svensk kriminalpolitk. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, (Zone Books, 2015).

[62] Andersson, Kriminalpolitikens väsen.

[63] Anna Ohlsson, Myt och manipulation: Radikal psykiatrikritik i svensk offentlig idédebatt 1968-1973, (Stockholm University, 2008). Lars-Christer Hydén (ed.), Från psykiskt sjuk till psykiskt funktionshindrad, (Studentlitteratur, 2005).

[64] Sahlin, Brottsprevention.

[65] Andersson & Nilsson, Svensk kriminalpolitik.

[66] Vanja Ceccato, Lisansdra Vasquez, Linda Langefors, Ana Paula Canabarro & Robin Petersson, Trygg stadsmiljö: Teori och praktik för brottsförebyggande & trygghetsskapande åtgärder, (Kungliga tekniska högskolan, 2019).

[67] BRÅ, Brottsförebyggande arbete i praktiken: 19 lokala projekt, (Brottsförebyggande rådet, 2004).

[68] Andersson & Wahlgren, `Local crime prevention´.

[69] https://nyheter24.se/maktkamp24/906278-jimmie-akesson-vill-riva-fororter-inte-trevligt-att-bo-dar

[70] Boverket 2023.

[71] Fear of crime, or insecurity and unsafety are in Sweden conceptualized as Trygghet and otrygghet and counteracting the populace´s felling of otrygghet is since the early 1990s one half of the purpose of crime policy (the second half being the reduction of crime). Trygghet encompasses more than just felling safe from crime, and addresses also feelings of security. Historically in Sweden economic trygghet was central to the social democrats and unemployment benefits and social insurance were means to establishing economic trygghet. Re-formulating the idea of trygghet and associating it instead with crime was a major crime policy move by the social democrats during the 1990s and 2000s. See Robert Andersson, `Tryggare kan ingen vara´, in Torbjörn Hjort, Philip Lalander & Roddy Nilsson (eds.), Den ifrågasatte medborgaren - om utsatta gruppers relation till välfärdssystemen, (Växjö, 2010). Making Trygghet such an important crime policy question have had important consequences in Sweden, for a interesting analysis thereof see Hanna Lilja Sahlin The emergence, establishment and expansion of fear of crime research in Sweden, (Diss. Lund university, 2021).

[72] Svenska Dagbladet, 7 June, 2005.

[73] The Swedish Police Authority, National Operations Department, Criminal Influence in the Local Community - A Situational Picture of the Development in Vulnerable Areas, (2019-06-03).

[74] The Swedish Police Authority, National Operations Department, Criminal Influence in the Local Community.

[75] The Swedish Police Authority, National Operations Department, Situation Report on Vulnerable Areas, (2021), p. 4.

[76] Svenska Dagbladet, 28 Oktober, 2014.

[77] Michel Foucault, The punitive society: lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973, (Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, 2015).

[78] Bernard Harcourt, `Course context´, in Foucault, The Punitive Society.

[79] Press conferences, A National Census, The Swedish government (2023-03-30).

[80]https://www.socialdemokraterna.se/download/18.4541e3ad18bf09bfeed23d3/1701084580894/2.%20Ökad%20samhällsgemenskap%20genom%20att%20vi%20delar%20ett%20gemensamt%20språk.pdf.

[81] My translation. In original: Hemmets grundval är gemensamheten och samkänslan. Det goda hemmet känner icke till några privilegierade eller tillbakasatta, inga kelgrisar och inga styvbarn. Där ser icke den ene ner på den andre. Där försöker ingen skaffas sig fördel på andras bekostnad, den starke trycker icke ner och plundrar den svage, I det goda hemmet råder likhet, omtanke, samarbete, hjälpsamhet.

Crime Policy, the Open Society, and the Governance of Territory

Abstract