Welfare state development and Finnish criminal justice reform from the 1910s to the 1960s
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520964939 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Welfare state
development and
Finnish criminal justice
reform from the 1910s
to the 1960s
Esko H€
akkinen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
In contemporary research, Nordic countries are considered to have comparatively
lenient penal policies, such as the restricted use of imprisonment. However, criminal
justice in Finland during the early decades of its independence was exceptionally harsh.
Due to its history, Finland is considered a difficult case for institutionalist theories that
have related the Nordic welfare state model with lenient penal policy. This analysis
argues that Finland’s development away from this severity was, in fact, caused by the
shift of its social policy toward that of a (Nordic) welfare state in the 1940s, which is
associated with the adoption of the model of democratic corporatism after decades of
intense political conflict. The 1940s were a turning point when regulation of prison
population sizes started to become an objective in legislation concerning the penal
system. Meanwhile, independent of legislation, judges’ attitudes and sentencing practi-
ces began to relax. A generational replacement began among the criminal justice elite
that manifested as generational disagreement in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, a reform-
ist consensus was achieved.
Keywords
corporatism, criminal justice, Durkheim, Finland, legal history, punishment and society,
sociology of law, welfare state
Corresponding author:
Esko H€
akkinen, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Email: esko.hakkinen@helsinki.fi
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520964939
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2022, Vol. 24(1) 116–135
Introduction
In comparative penal policy, the Nordic countries are often admired as kind and
trusting societies. According to John Pratt and Anna Eriksson’s (2013) Nordic
exceptionalism thesis, their humaneness results from the Nordic culture, a product
of long historical processes. However, they also note that Finland’s social and
penal development drastically diverged from Scandinavia at the beginning of the
20
th
century for several decades. Finland of the 1920s and 1930s was a country that
had only recently recovered from a civil war with an aftermath of prison camps
and executions, where governments were pursuing laissez-fare economic policies,
and where industrialists used violent strike-breakers to confront small militant
trade unions. The imprisonment rate was extraordinarily high, and the Finnish
police were fighting a violent prohibition battle against alcohol traffickers with
little trust from the public. Since then, Finnish criminal justice has become notice-
ably more befitting of a Nordic welfare state. For Pratt and Eriksson (2013: 6–7),
Finland was simply returning to its cultural home. On the other hand, more
detailed histories of this development have emphasized the nature of this change
as a consolidated effort that was organized by key individuals, beginning at the end
of the 1960s (e.g., Lappi-Sepp€
al€
a, 2009: 349–360).
I argue that the Finnish criminal justice has been neither culturally determined
nor coordinated by individuals but has taken its form somewhere in between, in
the context of political guidelines broader than mere penal policy. Returning to the
Nordic path was not inevitable, but rather, it was made possible by radical changes
in the institutional context of Finnish criminal justice, which facilitated reconcil-
iation and a shift toward socially responsible penal policy. Here, considering the
overlooked development that occurred in Finnish criminal justice from the 1940s
to 1960s preceding the criminal justice activism of the 1970s matters. Cross-
comparisons show the significance of welfare institutions and social corporatism
for imprisonment rates. This article adds the temporal dimension: Does the devel-
opment of the imprisonment rate vary with the development of these institutions
over time?
In the following paper, I present an institutionalist framework of the analysis,
the method for a theory-oriented case study, a detailed depiction of the discussion
surrounding the Finnish case, itemized research questions, a historical analysis,
and corresponding conclusions.
Durkheimian causal model
Institutionalism refers to the idea that the way political activities are organized
makes a difference independent of other factors, such as cultural contexts, tech-
nological development, and the diffusion of ideologies. While explanations vary,
broad criminological literature associates economic deregulation, welfare state
retrenchment, and rising inequality with a punitive turn in Western democracies
(e.g., Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2009). Consistent with this claim, comparative
117
H€
akkinen
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