The risk–gang nexus in Sweden: Penal layering and the uneven topography of penal change
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221132157 |
| Author | Henrik Örnlind,Torbjörn Forkby |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
The risk–gang nexus
in Sweden: Penal layering
and the uneven topography
of penal change
Henrik Örnlind and Torbjörn Forkby
Linnaeus University, Sweden
Abstract
This article maps the emergence of a risk–gang nexus in the Swedish correctional field.
Using the concept of penal layering, the article analyses the configuration of risk-based
practices to manage gang affiliates in the context of Swedish prison and probation
services. By introducing the notion interludes of penal layering, this article stresses the
synchronic/diachronic opposition in penal change processes and furthers ongoing discus-
sions of the variegated, braided, and uneven patterns of penal change in and beyond
Nordic penal institutions. Drawing on interviews with probation officers, prison staff,
and other professionals working with gangs in Sweden, the study finds that new rules,
practices, decisional hierarchies, and actors have been layered on top of or alongside
existing institutional arrangements to manage gang affiliates. This penal layer enforces
punitive conditions for incarcerated gang affiliates and creates tensions, agonism, and
contradictions between the coexisting and multiple logics of rehabilitation, punishment,
and risk in the penal field.
Keywords
gangs, nordic exceptionalism, penal layering, prisons, risk assessments
Introduction
No European country has experienced such an increase in gang-related lethal gun
violence as Sweden has (Sturup et al., 2019). Political parties have tried to trump each
Corresponding author:
Henrik Örnlind, Department of Social Work, Linnaeus University, Vaxjo, Sweden.
Email: henrik.oernlind@lnu.se
Article
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(4) 1080–1099
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14624745221132157
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other’s plans to combat the situation, usually expressed through tough-on-crime policies.
In September 2019, Sweden’s Social Democratic government launched a 34-point gang
intervention programme that included proposals for more surveillance, anti-gang legisla-
tion, and a greater focus on crime prevention (Regeringen, 2019). Katarina Påhlsson,
Parliamentary Ombudsman, was doubtful about the sentencing enhancements and con-
cluded: ‘If the proposals are carried through, they will entail far-reaching consequences
on crimes without such a [gang] connection’(Justitieombudsmannen, 2021). The pro-
posed anti-gang policies were closely connected to the rise of new policing practices
in marginalized communities. Since the mid-2010s, the Swedish police have targeted
poor areas in Swedish cities, calling them ‘parallel societies’,‘social risks’, and ‘particu-
larly vulnerable areas’, illuminating not only the geography of social inequality, but also
the transformation of welfare state strategies from universal ones addressing structural
problems, to more selective measures based on risk governance. In the continuing
debate, political parties have suggested a number of risk-informed strategies to identify
youths at risk of joining gangs, including screening children’s language skills at very
early age. Such proliferation of penal power to fight gangs indicates a significant trans-
formation of Sweden’s patterns of punishment.
How and why penal institutions, practices, and ideas change is a key topic in crimin-
ology (Daems, 2008; Goodman et al., 2015; Rubin, 2016, 2018). Influential theories of
penal change have linked macro-structural social changes –including industrial capital-
ism, the Keynesian welfare state, and neoliberalism –to the emergence of particular penal
institutions, technologies, and practices (Foucault, 1995; Garland, 2001; Wacquant,
2009). In the so-called ‘punitive turn’beginning in the 1970s, Garland (2001) linked
major social changes in politics and the economy to the emergence of risk discourse,
punitive rhetoric, and the social construction of dangerous offender groups that under-
pinned the cultural formation of a late-modern ‘crime complex’. Risk coupled with dan-
gerousness formed a collective experience of crime, furthered the criminalization of
social problems, and led to the invention of new governance arrangements for managing
high-risk groupings (Andrews et al., 1990; Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001;
Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat, 2006). Harcourt (2007: 174), for instance, argues that
‘the social shift in our conception of just punishment in the 1980s and ‘90s can be
traced specifically to the rise of actuarial methods and their implementation’.Ina
similar fashion, gang scholars Decker et al. (2022: 333) argue that rehabilitative gang
interventions faded away in the 1980s, turning gang affiliation into a category that
‘could be exploited to result in an extra-legal penalty on charging decisions, pretrial
detention, juvenile transfers to adult court, sentences to confinement, and longer
sentences’.
Such rupture-based accounts of penal change have been criticized for downplay-
ing the uneven, variegated, and braided character of penal change (Goodman et al.,
2015; Hutchinson, 2006; Rubin, 2016) and for exaggerating the coherence of specific
historical penal regimes (Hutchinson, 2006). Moreover, mechanical views of penal
change tend to underestimate the ongoing struggle and tensions between different
actors in the penal field striving to shape criminal policy objectives (Goodman
et al., 2015).
Örnlind and Forkby 1081
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