Crime policy is increasingly legitimized by reference to the public sense of justice. A research project has therefore been conducted in all five Scandinavian countries in order to examine the public's views on punishment. These views have been examined by means of simple questions in telephone interviews, by vignettes in postal questionnaires, and by focus groups having seen a film of a mock trial. The results show that, when asked simple questions, the public want stiffer sentences. In their assessments of the vignette crimes, the public demands on average lower prison sentences than judges, and this tendency becomes stronger in the focus group study. The propensities towards punitiveness seem to diminish with more information and increasing proximity to the parties involved.
Since the 1970s, crime policy has become politicized. Conservative parties have launched the law and order theme and exploited crime in political campaigns. Social Democratic and other leftist parties have more or less reluctantly followed. Since the 1990s, however, the political left itself seems now to take the lead in the reshaping of crime policy in a less liberal direction. Tendencies towards such a development are clearly discernible in Italy, Germany, the UK and the Scandinavian countries. The article discusses a number of elements of and explanations for the sharpening of Social Democratic crime policy in Sweden: a tendency towards alarmism, the tradition of left realism and the politicization of crime policy, the goal of a drug-free society, the practice of an interventionist policy, the increasing use of symbolic legislation, the demand for zero tolerance and the discipline of the market and the increasing inequality. These elements are finally seen as indicators of problems of integration and consensus characterizing Sweden and the political left at the turn of the century.
During the 1980s, the slogan a “drug-free society” became the catchword of the official narcotics policy in Sweden. An analysis based on platforms of the political parties, parliamentary bills, and the debate in national newspapers and journals tries to explain why the reactions against drugs have become so strong despite data showing that the problem is limited and not increasing. The interpretation is made that one reason why reactions against drugs have become so strong and so widespread in Sweden is that they serve the function of strengthening a threatened national identity in a situation where the traditional “Swedish Model” has come under increasingly hard attack from both inside and outside the country.
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