Nordic Exceptionalism revisited: Explaining the paradox of a Janus-faced penal regime
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Author | Vanessa Barker |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612468935 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Theoretical Criminology
17(1) 5 –25
Nordic Exceptionalism
© The Author(s) 2012
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revisited: Explaining the
DOI: 10.1177/1362480612468935
tcr.sagepub.com
paradox of a Janus-faced
penal regime
Vanessa Barker
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract
Nordic penal regimes are Janus-faced: one side relatively mild and benign; the other
intrusive, disciplining and oppressive. This paradox has not been fully grasped or
explained by the Nordic Exceptionalism thesis which overstates the degree to which
Nordic penal order is based on humaneness and social solidarity, an antidote to mass
incarceration. This essay examines the split in the foundation of the Swedish welfare
state: it simultaneously promotes individual well-being in the social sphere but enables
intrusive deprivations of liberty and in some cases, violates the principles of human
rights. The backbone of the welfare state, Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, is at once
demos, democratic and egalitarian and ethnos, a people by blood, exclusionary and
essentialist. The lack of individual rights and an ethno-cultural conception of citizenship
make certain categories of people such as criminal offenders, criminal aliens, drug
offenders and perceived ‘others’, particularly foreign nationals, vulnerable to deprivation
and exclusion.
Keywords
Ethnicity, public criminology, punishment and society, social exclusion, welfare state
Countervailing tendencies in a mild penal regime
In May 2011, the Justice Ombudsman of Sweden, Hans-Gunnar Axberger issued a
searing report on the practices and policies of the Swedish Migration Board’s
Corresponding author:
Vanessa Barker, Sociology Department, Stockholm University, Stockholm 10691, Sweden.
Email: vanessa.barker@sociology.su.se
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Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
detention centers for migrants. Following his internal investigation, the Justice
Ombudsman (JO) criticized the Board for misapplying the law in ways that subjected
foreigners to more intrusive deprivations than nationals (Axberger, 2011: Dnr 6090–
2009, p. 2). Detailing routines that placed self-harming detainees in remand prisons
locked in cells, placed detainees in prisons with convicted criminal offenders, relied
on poorly trained hourly wage workers to make placement decisions, and made the
default position the most restrictive, the JO argued that these practices were simply
wrong in principle. It was wrong to place people with immigration violations in prison
alongside suspected and convicted offenders. Drawing attention to the imprisonment
of self-harming detainees, he called the practice distressing, beklämmande, and
regrettable, beklagligt, a practice no one seemed to support but continued anyway.
The treatment of detainees, according to the Justice Ombudsman, violated human
rights and was an insult to personal dignity. It was an outrage, en kränkning, a particu-
larly stinging criticism in a society based on the maintenance of personal dignity
through equal treatment.
These practices coupled with the use of pre-trial detention in criminal cases, the
common use of restrictions and isolation in pre-trial detention, the overrepresenta-
tion of foreign nationals in prison, the ‘return’ of failed asylum seekers, the deporta-
tion of criminal aliens, the deportation of children, the compulsory treatment of
drug addicts and alcoholics, and the imprisonment of drug users are policy out-
comes that do not neatly conform to the conventional view of Sweden as a reservoir
of mild penal sanctioning and human rights protections. While Sweden does main-
tain relatively low imprisonment rates and relatively humane prison conditions as
indicated by and central to the Nordic Exceptionalism (NE) thesis (Pratt, 2008;
Pratt and Eriksson, 2012), it is clear there are a number of contemporary practices
and policies that do not match the empirical description or normative underpinning
of penal moderation. ‘Open prisons’, remarkable for their low level of security,
inmate autonomy, and humaneness, figure prominently in the NE thesis as a barom-
eter of Scandinavian progressivism, but in reality, this is not the norm as most
inmates are housed in mid-level security units (Kriminalvården, 2012), which fits
better with Swedish values of moderation, that is lagom, not too much and not too
little. But perhaps more importantly, there are a number of practices that highlight
the ‘pains of imprisonment’, that is, the disciplining and distressing nature of con-
finement, even in relatively mild penal regimes such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
and Finland (Basberg Neumann, 2012; Mathiesen, 2012; Scharff Smith, 2012;
Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012). Moreover, the detention and deportation of migrants,
against the historical backdrop of large-scale forced sterilization of thousands of
Swedish women, including ethnic minorities such as the Roma (Broberg and
Hansen, 1996; Roth and Hertzberg, 2010) and forced quarantine of HIV/AIDs
patients in the early 1980s (Baldwin, 2005), suggests the presence, if not a pattern,
of human rights violations of those deemed unwanted or ‘undeserving’ (Åmark,
2001; Björkman, 2001), including at times foreign nationals (Axberger, 2011;
Committee against Torture, 2008; Utskottets Överväganden, 2010/2011: SfU6),
ethnic minorities (Roth and Hertzberg, 2010), and other kinds of perceived outsid-
ers (Björkman, 2001; Trägårdh and Svedberg, 2012).
Barker
7
A split in the Swedish welfare state
That said, none of these examples necessarily disqualify the NE thesis. But they are dif-
ficult to understand and explain given the thesis’ partial reading of the Swedish welfare
state. The Nordic Exceptionalism thesis claims that Scandinavian/Nordic countries
(Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Finland) maintain more humane and mild penal
regimes because of their distinctive welfare states which are rooted in social cohesion,
conformity and egalitarianism (Pratt and Eriksson, 2012). Strong cultures of equality,
social solidarity, faith in social engineering, state expertise, and consensus politics, the
thesis argues, decrease criminogenic conditions and moderate penal severity (see Green,
2008; Lappi-Seppälä, 2008).
From this view, the only way to explain the repressive examples would be to see them
as a breakdown or retraction of the welfare state, the result of social change. But it would
be a mistake to argue that new trends are replacing a more moderate tradition. This is not
a story about the globalization of punitiveness (Brown, 2005), the spread of American
neoliberalism (Wacquant, 2009), or converging cultures of control (Garland, 2001).
Nordic penal order is Janus-faced, to invoke Wacquant’s cogent image of the double-
sided nature of the State: it is mild and harsh simultaneously. But to explain it, we need
to deepen our analysis of the welfare state. Both mild and repressive elements coexist
because of the duality of the Swedish welfare state—a duality that promotes individual
well-being and autonomy in the social sphere while resisting individual rights in the
legal sphere (Trägårdh and Svedberg, 2012). These factors are not mere ‘social costs’
associated with the welfare state, they are central to it. As Henrik Tham (1995) has
explained, the Social Democratic Party has a long history of interventionist approaches
to crime and other perceived social problems with the latest attempt to create a ‘drug-free
society’ through the imprisonment and confinement of both users and dealers. These
measures were not imposed from the outside but came from within.
The Nordic Exceptionalism thesis is fast becoming a social fact, that is, a taken for
granted reality with a force of its own, as Magnus Hörnqvist (2012) explains. This is
problematic he argues, since many Nordic prison researchers find the thesis hard to
uphold, controversial, and normative as evidenced in the recent collection, Penal
Exceptionalism? Nordic Prison Policy and Practice (Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012).
Although many of the contributors in Penal Exceptionalism? are critical of the thesis,
most mainly take issue with the characterization of penal outcomes but do not examine
the welfare state itself, the driving force of the thesis (Scharff Smith, 2012, is an excep-
tion). As such, there is a gap in our understanding of the welfare state that has important
implications for penal order. This essay seeks to fill that gap.
This essay has three goals:
(1) It identifies two structural barriers in the Swedish welfare state—the lack of indi-
vidual rights and an ethno-cultural conception of citizenship—that create condi-
tions conducive to intrusive deprivations in the penal field, particularly for
perceived outsiders such as foreign nationals and ethnic minorities.
(2) By identifying these structural barriers in the welfare state, the essay then calls
into question the progressive characterization of Swedish penal order based on
8
Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
human dignity and social solidarity. It suggests we take more seriously the Janus-
faced nature of the Swedish case.
(3) It concludes by rethinking the degree to which welfare state generosity may or
may not lead to mild penal sanctioning and suggests alternative and inclusionary
mechanisms that can promote individual liberty.
A note on research strategy: this article examines the specific case of Sweden rather
than the range of Nordic...
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