Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets | Hacker News Reader

Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

theguardian.com

189 pointsfrank_boyd175 comments

Beware of the political spin!

Note that while the number of inmates plummets, the number of crimes committed is higher than ever. This is a failure of the police and the justice system and not a success story.

Nearly 95 percent of violent crimes and robberies committed in Sweden go unsolved, and an individual police officer solves an average of three crimes per year. http://www.thelocal.se/20081103/15412

Sounds like Nottingham in the UK's bullshit crime statistics.

"Arrests fallen! Crime rates lower than ever!"

Actually people just do it vigilante style or don't bother reporting it because the police are fucking useless.

I mean I caught a person breaking into my car, had photos of the person doing it, the car was covered in finger prints, they arrived in another stolen car with plates that were photographed, left their tools in the car when disturbed and the police said they found "no evidence".

Was resolved for a small fee by a private "individual" who knew who they were.

To be fair, the supreme court have also taken on itself to change the sentencing. The lack of inmates could be because of a change in 2010. [Edit: the effects of which, are seen now]

Most inmates serving 10+ years in Swedish prisons are drug related cases.

In 2010, the Swedish supreme court decided to dramatically change the policy regarding punishment for drug trafficking. What was previously a 14-year prison sentence suddenly became a 4 year crime. [Update: Prisoners sentenced in 2010 would previosly have been staying in prison for 10+ years but after the change they are now released in 2013 for good behaviour.]

http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev...

Also important to note is in Sweden there is no drug scheduling system like there would be in the Anglo countries. If one were to sell or move a lot of cannabis, it would be the same as selling or moving a lot or heroin or crystal meth.

For small amounts of anything, there are no custodial sentences but the fine will be about half of your monthly salary (or approximately £50 if you have no job).

I have heard anecdotal cases of houses/flats being raided on nothing more than simple suspicion because someone seemed sleepy or had red eyes.

Also happens in Finland. If the police catches you smoking a joint in a park, they will raid your house in most cases. There must be something for them to find, to protect you and to protect the society...

That sounds kind of like the EU countries I've lived in / been to; unless the police is standing next to the crime happening nothing much happens. And that is not just (just, because it is of course) populist talk; it happens a lot. People point out the crime, have images, videos on their phones and the police makes a nice report; you'll never hear about it again.

I had it in Spain. I understand the vigilante crap even if you didn't get hurt; you feel so powerless sitting at the police giving them pics, fingerprints, number plate and make of the getaway car while they are just nodding writing all down and putting it in a drawer knowing they won't do anything.

As a counter point, I was mugged a couple of years back, and reported it after blocking my phone, etc. expecting a "Well there's not much we can do".

The police arrived within 10 minutes and took a statement. Since I'd seen one of the guys beforehand throwing a beer can at a car, they drove me back to that spot and we found the can. They got DNA from it and found out who it was, caught them and they were found guilty (they also picked me up & dropped me off when I needed to do a video lineup).

I then had victim support offer counselling & general contact and was updated with how things were going by post.

They were absolutely excellent as far as I'm concerned, particularly for a fairly minor crime (I was threatened but not actually hit) in a major city (Manchester in the UK, specifically Salford at the time).

Good to hear it can be different! I understand they cannot do this kind of thing every time, but at least learn some bedside manners and comfort the victim. I mean; they see muggings etc every day, but making me feel it's just normal and no-one cares is the bad thing EVEN if they don't do anything. If they actually get DNA/prints and use them, that rocks.

Here in Portugal, my brother left his cellphone unattended and someone took it. We filled a claim with the cops (mostly for insurance purposes) and they got it back after a month or so, without so much as a description of the person who took it (I believe they got an address from the carrier).

Of course, this is just anecdotal.

Did you raise this with the IPCC[0]?

[0]http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/

No - that's purely a form of idealism.

At best you'll get an apology from the police which isn't worth the effort.

Additionally, don't make a complaint about the police unless you fully understand what you are getting yourself into. There is a reasonable chance that they will harass you and your family until they can find some reason to arrest you (or they may just arrest you for no reason).

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/11/police-vendetta-la...

A defence solicitor who was awarded £550,000 in damages from a police force after he was wrongly arrested says officers mounted a vendetta against him after one of his clients was acquitted.

James Watson said Cleveland police officers spent three years pursuing him, costing millions of pounds, without finding any evidence against him, before admitting a series of mistakes.

Yeah that's about right.

It's about the arrests, not the crimes.

I had a friend in Belgium who was raped in the street one evening by three young men. The police did not take much interest. There was no medical examination done. They said they would call her back to look at some pictures but they never did.

I've fought off muggers several times over the years. I've never bothered to call the police, especially as the actions taken in self-defence might themselves constitute a crime.

Despite all the hype in the cinema, my general impression is that policemen are basically bureaucrats carrying guns, not too different from teachers or bus drivers.

I know it's quite a jump, but it reminds me of the video of the baby being run on by a car while nobody cared. Some people said being involved could be misinterpreted by the police causing you to be jailed or worse.

I've lived in Sweden and Finland. That sounded more like Sweden. In Finland the police is trusted and appreciated. Among the most trusted civic functions in interviews, afaik.

Crime rates are lower than they've been in a long time. And the reason we know they are, is the crime survey. The crime survey telephones a bunch of random people and asks them if they've been a victim of crime in the past 12 months.

The number of people reporting they're a victim of crime has been dropping since the late 90s.

The police are there to:

- Do you for speeding.

- Protect the establishment.

- Threaten violence.

- Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations.

They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact control and to keep the powerful powerful.

Agree entirely. I've learned this over the last few years.

This is not how a democratic nation is supposed to work. So please don't hold up this characterization of the police as something which is inevitable. The democratic ideal is that the police have a national monopoly on the legal use of violence, and the use of this violence is dictated by the laws and the courts. This is how well-working democratic nations work, and it is indeed how the police force in my home country works.

That anything else can be said about the USA today (maybe also the UK?), is just a testament to the scale of the democratic problems you guys have. You are really deep into it, and it doesn't seem like you realize the extent of the problem.

It is inevitable. Every society has descended into this so far, until there is a revolution.

Us people in the UK realise what is happening. At some point, the moment will occur when the state oversteps the mark on something and the shit will get flipped country-wide.

Yup, just said the same as you. Hobbes and Hayek both anticipated this.

Revolution is the only way out.

Thanks for posting this. Just the motivation I need to read The Road To Serfdom which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.

No, it isn't, but it appears to be the endgame of representative democracy. I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan, or perhaps Hayek's Road to Serfdom, if you haven't already, as both anticipated this exact malaise. The US and the UK are in the terminal stages of decline.

The representative democratic ideal is ultimately revealed to be a fiction, and the rule of law is a falsehood - for without a universally applied rule of law, there is no rule of law - just authoritarianism - and our rule of law is decidedly not universal, and never has been. One set of rules for us, one for them.

All representative democracy eventually declines under the same disease of creeping authoritarianism due to the inevitable desire of entrenched power structures and bureaucracies to self-sustain and expand. This should not be mistaken for malice, rather it's the inevitable output of a system optimised for self-preservation.

The only solution to my mind while maintaining a democratic ideal is either strict sortition, or direct democracy.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why hasn't my native Norway ended up in this spot? Claiming "it is inevitable" isn't a valid argument, projecting to unlikely-seeming future scenarios can be used to prove anything. Just because two big nations have ended up with a screwed-up political system doesn't prove that it is an inevitability.

Try arguing with a Norwegian police officer. Even calmly. Odds of ending up in jail overnight are pretty high, though you might find one with a sense of humour now.

Norway is one of those countries where shouting insults at a police officer can be illegal where shouting those same insults at a random strangers would not be - there explicitly is one law for public officials and one for the rest.

The idea of public officials being above the rest is deeply embedded in the Norwegian system, and only started fading with the growth of the labour movement, and steady inclusion of the labour movement into the establishment starting with the first lasting Ap (labour party) government in 1935 onwards. Even then, Ap took up the baton (..), and wielded it against the groups to their own left, with extensive illegal political surveillance for decades.

The reason Norway is now as civilized as it is, is simple:

Norway eventually got filthy rich thanks to the oil. The average salary in Norway is about 70% above the average salary in the UK, for example, and the salary curve is far flatter.

We've had social democratic ministers from a party that used argue for revolution and was an early member of Komintern that are millionaires. A long range of our past "threats" to the establishment are now wealthy and firmly embedded in the establishment. The class struggle in Norway is largely "on hold", and the police is being wielded against immigrants instead.

Do you have any sources to back up these claims? Some can probably be documented with a bit of historical digging, but most of this is just opinion which does not match my experience.

Not cooperating with the police will get you in trouble anywhere in the world.

> I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan

WELP. Time to find ourselves a king.

Could you please add a bit of explanation as to why you are so confident that this interpretation of the role of the police should be regarded as categorical fact?

Particularly in the case of UK, if your knowledge allows, given that we operate, at least in principle, an explicitly Peelian system of policing, in contrast to, for example, our European neighbours.

Consider the UK police treatment of demonstrators. It's one of the most brutal in Western Europe, and in many countries the very idea of a practice like kettling brings out images of fascist dictatorships.

I'm Norwegian. In Norway, government officials are often found participating in May day demonstrations, and it's a public holiday. Imagine my shock the first May day I experienced after moving to the UK, with police lining up units on horseback with shields all around and slowly forcing demonstrators into a smaller and smaller space and keeping them their for hours.

How does that fit with Peelian principles to you? It's the kind of method that is pretty much designed to provoke violence and distrust.

I too think that kettling is provocative and unnecessary. There is a balance that we have to strike as a society between, on the one hand, protection of property and freedom from violence, and on the other, freedom of speech and expression.

Personally, I would rather we allowed more of the latter at the (potential) expense of less of the former, perhaps with some civil compensation scheme for any who might be affected.

I also think that we should allow much more disruption than we currently do - that is often one of the ways protesters make themselves heard. If protests were allowed to make more of an impact then people might feel less inclined to cause trouble. Unfortunately any impact on the great economic machine is seen as almost taboo in some, rather influential, quarters, which makes moves in that direction less likely.

Another part of the puzzle is community leadership, whatever 'community' means in the particular context. The leadership doesn't need to be centralised, but if people don't engage with the police in situations like that then things can get out of control. Though again this is another area where I think the police are often at fault: following orders rather than engaging with people.

All that said, I don't agree with madaxe's statement: "(the police) are categorically not there to help you. They never have been.", and to be frank I don't see how your example shows that it is so.

Is there an equivalent of the Danish People's Party or the beginnings of something similar? Someone to move the Overton window to the right?

Sverigedemokraterna?

That question mark is not needed. Sverigedemokraterna is very much in the same vein as the Danish People's Party and currently rates at about 10% in opinion surveys. They haven't changed the Overton Window very much since all other parties have a pretty solid front of not supporting Sverigedemokraterna but they most certainly have shifted the window a bit to the right.

I think they're a bit different from Dansk Folkeparti (DF), mostly in having considerably more questionable roots, which I would guess doesn't help their acceptance in the party mainstream. They have made an effort to clean up their image in the past few years, expelling a number of the extreme-right elements, but the party's roots in the far-right scene makes them a bit anathema to respectable society. The origins of the party, and much of their '80s and early-'90s crowd, came out of the "subcultural right", movements like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevara_Sverige_Svenskt, norse-pride and white-power metal bands, the motorcycle club scene, etc.

When Mikael Jansson defected from the Center Party and took over Sweden Democrats in 1995 he began a purge of the openly extreme-right elements of the party in order to turn it into a respectable anti-immigration movement, but it didn't really solidify until the past few years. Even in recent years they have had a struggle to keep those types out of the party, for example their youth leader from 2007-2010 (Erik Almqvist) was embarrassingly videotaped singing white-power music at a retreat, and was finally forced out of the party earlier this year (weirdly, for someone who opposes immigration, he reportedly emigrated to Hungary after resigning).

DF by contrast has different origins, culturally rooted in something more like old-person Danish culture, rather than youth radical-right culture. They have a vaguely mythologized idea of 19th-century or early-20th-century Danish culture, as they imagine one's grandfather in a small town in Jutland might have lived. They generally therefore view the radical right-wing scene as negative, as equally a deviation from traditional quiet Danish values as immigrant crime is. This has let them keep those elements out of the party more credibly, because it's not only for image that they do it, but because their base actually culturally dislikes the far-right (especially anyone associated with the metal or biker scenes, who they see as culturally un-Danish).

Not that I myself would vote for DF (as an immigrant in Denmark they aren't out to make life easier for me), but I somewhat understand their appeal better; they are more of a rural "traditionalist values" party than a radical nationalist party. I find it harder to understand how SD would get similar support, unless people either don't realize their association with the far-right subculture, really believe that their transformation is completed, or are just lodging protest votes.

I think Sverigedemokraterna's support arise from the fact that the issue of immigration is generally seen as taboo in public Swedish debate, so the political parties at best avoid it. It also makes sense for this reason, that Sweden has a far more hardcore and aggressive extreme right scene than Denmark has (even if not more hardcore or aggressive, it is a lot larger).

Because in Denmark, immigration can be part of public debate without being shunned, while in Sweden, it's hard to get any sort of ground in this debate without being labelled a racist.

So now, some of them are trying to be more 'reasonable' about it with the party Sverigedemokraterna. I assume because they haven't made any progress publicly in Sweden by just being seen as extremists. And more and more figures are beginning to tell Swedes that immigration is not an issue you can ignore, thus Sverigedemokraterna's support is rising, because it's the only party that wants to talk about it.

But I am confident, that most of its votes are 'protest votes', to get the other parties to talk about it.

That's not true. There is a vivid debate around immigration and asylum issues in both old fashioned- and social media.

Sverigedemokraterna is big because a large slew of the Swedish population is slanting toward racism and are prone to accept simple "solutions".

You oversimplify things. While you are to some extent correct I do not think that was the main reason for their surge in the last election. One contributing factor was the bullying from media and the other parties before the election where they were not allowed to participate in debates, all parties declared they would never cooperate with SD, and several newspapers ran anti-SD articles the day of the election. This strategy backfired heavily since everybody loves an underdog, and the faulty idea that if everyone wants someone silenced they must have something important to say.

There are also other factors like that some people genuinely seem to believe that SD has cleaned up their act.

EDIT: I am personally strongly pro-immigration (much more so than any party in Sweden) and I have to disagree about there being much debate about immigration in traditional media. There is a lot in social media though, so I have no idea where all the racists get their idea that they cannot debate immigration issues anywhere.

This is a typical talking-point of Sverigedemokraterna - the claiming that discussions around immigration are taboo in Swedish media. The major issue with this is that it's not actually the lack discussions about immigration (immigration-related actions and decisions by the government and the municipalities are frequently debated in "mainstream media" and commented on by editorials) - it's simply the fact that the majority of the Swedish people don't agree with the policies suggested by Sverigedemokraterna. If you listen to someones arguments and rejects them, are you then avoiding the debate just because you have rejected the arguments?

I will say that the Swedish population has become more polarised over this question - both the number of people who claim "immigration is good for Sweden" and "immigration is bad for Sweden" has risen over the past 10 years, shrinking the middle. There is also a strong correlation between education and attitude to immigration (in 2011, 56% of the people who had only 9 years of education agreed that reducing the number of asylum seekers to Sweden is good while only 22% of those with a university-degree agreed with the statement). This might explain some of the frustrations showcased by the people supporting Sverigedemokraterna and other anti-immigration parties - they might simply lack the ability to debate in the way public debates are typically held and coherently express their ideas in a convincing way.

Even if the case is that immigration is public debate in Sweden (and I don't doubt that), Sverigedemokraterna's success (in addition to the underdog status given by the media) is in part due to a feeling of taboo for their point of view. A frustration boiling to blow the lid.

The lack of immigration debate in the 1990s is what caused Dansk Folkeparti to gain enough support, that from 2001 to 2011, they could control the Danish government. So even if Sweden's immigration debate is happening, immigration debates always happen too late.

(But this is not unique to immigration.)

As another immigrant in Denmark, thanks for the detailed explanations of the difference between the two.

Ok, I did not know this, thanks for a good explanation. But do you agree that they seem to point the blame stick in the same direction? That immigrants are the threat to the "true original culture"? Or are DF more truly critical towards subcultures that maybe are ethnically "right" but immoral on a traditional conservative value scale, eg. bikers/punks?

Oh I agree, there's no doubt they're both mainly riding a populist backlash against immigration, especially Muslim immigration. I think the parties themselves differ considerably more than the broader wave they're riding, which has more common origins.

DF really do seem to be critical towards "ethnic Danish" subcultures they view as deviant as well, especially in the past year. There's currently a bit of hand-wringing over biker clubhouses (residents don't like having one nearby), and they've been getting out in front of that populist backlash too, which plays well among their base for different but related reasons. It's sort of Public Enemy #2 in things that are ruining Denmark, from their perspective.

Here's a recent story (via Google Translate, note that "rocker castle" means "biker clubhouse"): http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

I think they have opened the Overton window quite a bit. Today, established journalists and writers such as Herman Lindqvist, Ulf Nilsson, Stina Dabrowski, Elisabeth Höglund and Per Gudmundsson to name a few, use language and ideas borrowed from the far right -- things like referring to people as "ticking bombs" or arguing in a roundabout way that they (some with some of the biggest platforms in the country) can't state what they _actually_ think -- that they are somehow being repressed.

Thats what happen when politics start to dictate priorities for the police.

A large group of the police force and prosecutor have been dedicated to hunt down file sharing. An other group is dedicated to maintain the national firewall. Others deal with hunting down all those 16 years old kids who "hacks" websites with DDOS.

This failure of the police and the justice system has very little to do with the police, and all to do with the current politics. Going for 5% to 10% solved cases in violent crimes and robberies would simply not be as political attractive as getting that 16 year old sentenced.

It's also what happens when bureaucracy takes over, putting the officers in the office most of the day.

Politicians have always run the police - a police force is the government's visible threat of violence and method of control over the population. They're not there to protect you. They're there to protect the establishment.

Next time you call the police. Please recite that little speech to the responding officer.

"Responding officer"?

You mean, the phone drone whose job it is to go "sir, burglary is a civil matter, you will need to pursue it yourself"? Already have.

If you live somewhere where the police literally tell you "burglary is a civil matter", you need to either start a revolution or move to a civilized country.

In a functioning democracy, politics (i.e., the will of the people) should dictate the priorities for the police.

The corruption of said politics however is a different matter.

In a functioning democracy, a parliament of whores A/B tests slogans and suits until they find a winning combination, then do whatever they want.

I find it amusing that you warn of the political spin, yet cite as facts and link to an article that cites a "study" done for a TV show with no specifics about methods used or classification criteria given.

Why should we assign any more trust to just those numbers?

I presented an english-language article talking about the topic.

What I care about here is that the law enforcement should get better IRL. I don't care at all if you "trust" anything here, faceless HN user vidarh.I simply presented a fact for you to use or ignore.

There's quite a few recent articles about the abysmal Police work in Sweden, however they are in Swedish. Public service radio, just to pick one: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artik...

I'm sure you know how to use google to find more of the same. Have fun and please share the truth if you find it out there.

I'm Norwegian, so the Swedish article is not a problem.

The Swedish article you linked presents a far more nuanced picture and gives even more reasons to question the other link you gave.

It does not say anything about the number of crimes committed, so we can't really used this one to look at that. But it does on the other give a number of possible explanations for why the percentage of "solved" crimes dropped, though notably the article only refers to a drop versus the same period the previous year - it says nothing about longer term trends.

However what it says is interesting:

* The number of particularly complicated crimes, such as IT related crimes, have risen, though it gives no numbers. This claim is so fuzzy that it doesn't really tell us much, unfortunately.

* The police have reduced their focus on traffic related crimes, which includes a lot of easy to solve crimes. E.g. frequent traffic-stops will "net" a lot of crimes that are instantly solved at the same time as you identify the crime. By catching people drunk driving, or driving too fast, for example. Whether or not this change is good or bad really depends on whether it coincides with more accidents etc. If it doesn't, then one might argue the police and legislative have been overzealous about this in the past.

* In terms of drug related crimes, enforcement has shifted from users to dealers. "Solving" drug crimes is much easier when it involves going around and hassling vulnerable, highly visible addicts - where again the crime will be registered mainly if it is solved at the same time, by catching someone with drugs, - vs. tracking down dealers. Some of us would say this shift is distinctly positive even though it makes the numbers look worse.

* At the same time the article points out that numbers for some crimes that have a much more direct effect on the general public, such robberies of homes and, as a follow on, resale of stolen property, have improved.

So many of the crimes they have de-emphasised which previously scored them many easily solved crimes, are victim-less crimes or have no direct victims, and it is not clear that the reduction in solved crimes there is a problem at all. The shift in enforcement especially when it comes to drugs is in line with international shifts in attitudes. The freed up resources have seemingly been funnelled into crimes that have more serious effects on the general public, but which require more resources - such as the effort to identify key individuals tied to break-ins etc. and following them up intensively. This has been done specifically in response to policy decisions by the government, that have asked for a focus on these types of more complex crimes, and so gives even less reason to justify any claim about "abysmal Police work".

No part of the article supports any kind of idea of a crisis in the Swedish police's ability to solve crimes, nor any idea of massively rising crime. It doesn't disprove it either - it is largely orthogonal to the original claims.

I wish I had time to dig around, but I don't. I do find it interesting that you chose this article to illustrate, though, if there's "quite a few recent articles about the abysmal Police work in Sweden", as it doesn't really address the issues.

> No part of the article supports any kind of idea of a crisis in the Swedish police's ability to solve crimes

I can't be reading the same article as you, but I'll leave it at that.

Since you claim to read Swedish, try this google search for Swedish police solves fewer crimes: https://www.google.se/#q=svensk+polis+l%C3%B6ser+f%C3%B6rre+...

I paraphrase the first few hits:

- Despite more money, fewer crimes a solved (SVT.SE) - The police solves fewer crimes despite new billions (DN.SE) - Police solves fewer crimes than ever (Aftonbladet) - Police increasingly worse at solving crimes (Expressen) - Finnish police solves 80% - Swedish solves 17% (Exponerat) - Swedish police solves even fewer crimes (HBL.FI)

and the list goes on.

I can't be reading the same internet as you, if you can't find quote a few recent articles about the abysmal police work in Sweden.

Since you already admitted that you liked my source I assume that you also read the introductory page which contains this enlightening paragraph at the top [1]:

Comparisons between countries that are based on their individual crime statistics require caution since such statistics are produced differently in different countries. Criminal statistics do not provide a simple reflection of the level of crime in a given country.

Criminal statistics are influenced by both legal and statistical factors, and by the extent to which crime is reported and registered. These factors can vary from one country to another. There are no international standards for how crime statistics should be produced and presented and this makes international comparisons difficult.

The comparison with Finnland doesn't hold. Also the 17% you quote directly contradicts the 6% in your earlier article, at least one of the two can't be right.

Then again, the GP doesn't contradict the assertion that the overall ratio is now lower than a year ago. You're nit refuting his point. His argument is that the police now concentrates less on easily solvable crimes that have little effect on the general population but rather on more difficult crimes with significant effect on the general population - which in my book is a good thing. Tying police success or failure to a statistic that measures something only tangentially related is a mistake, albeit a common one, even in high profile newspapers. (cue rant about journalism today).

http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statisti...

Comparisons with Sweden is probably hard.

I seriously think of Swedish media as something out of Animal Farm these days. Or 1984.

I got vertigo a month or so ago, when the editor of DN (largest non-tabloid, or so they claim) discuss how good news are never big news, but bad news are. About the same time I saw in Forskning & Framsteg that the group rape statistics has increased fourfold since the 1990s. That had not been discussed at all in the media.

Lots of other examples exists.

Talking of political spin, you can usually tell when someone is trying to twist facts to make them seem more interesting. They combine things that don't really go together and put the worst one first e.g. "violent crimes and robberies".

You might think, no they're talking about "violent crimes" and "violent robberies" yet the police chief is quoted as saying: " When it comes to theft, there are no witnesses, and victims often don’t know when the crime occurred."

So unless these victims are so viciously beaten by muggers that they get amnesia it seems more likely to be non-violent thefts.

If the violent crimes are really that bad then why not present their stats alone?

In the US, theft and robbery are classified separately. One of the distinguishing characteristics is that robbery generally involves force or the threat of force to take something.

Same for in Sweden.

Wikipedia says robbery, assault and sexual assault ("contact crimes") together made up 12% of reported crimes in 2003 Sweden. Theft related were 53%.

The article claims that in 2007 Sweden "violent crimes and robberies make up about 75 percent of all crimes reported in Sweden."

I'd say they've conflated theft and robbery in that article, possibly a translation issue, possibly fear mongering.

(edit: and this is backed up by the link to the official stats given elsewhere in the thread by Xylakant which has robbery as less than 1% of reported crimes in 2012)

That's particularly likely given the quote where the national police chief is quoted as talking about thefts.

Or maybe there are more laws criminalizing people that the police themselves thinks are ridiculous and they aren't executing them?

Yeah I must admit the op article seems to be pure political spin. You can read in the official statistics that number of crimes have absolutely exploded in Sweden since 1975:

http://www.d-intl.com/2013/11/08/dramatisk-okning-av-valdsbr...

It seems to me they should in fact rapidly increase the numbe of prisons, if they want to protect people.

d-intl.com is run by a bunch of paranoid and outright crazy neo-fascist. It's extremely racist and have close ties to the Norwegian terrorist Ander Bering Breivik as well as to the violent English Defence League(EDL). It's not by any means a decent source for anything.

Well thats just like your opinion, and not true at all.

The problem in Sweden is the same as in Denmark only worse. The media is controlled by leftists to a degree that almost no rightwing views are ever presented.

In Denmark 80% of journalists vote to the left, and we only have one or two papers who present the 55% of the population who vote on the right wing. The same is true in Sweden only worse.

d-intl.com/Tryckfrihetssällskapet have on numerous occasions invited EDL (now former) leader Stephen "Tommy Robinson" Yaxley-Lennon to speech at rallies and meetings. That's a fact.

Your other statements are the typical Swedish right-wing conspiracy theory and slur that has no correlation with reality.

I dont know about Sweden, but in Denmark, it has been documentet many times, that about 80% of the journalists are left wing. Any way I got a bit off track here.

The subject at hand is that number of prisons are being reduced, while the number of crimes are exploding through the roof according to the official statistics. And that just seems a bit odd to say the least.

> The same is true in Sweden only worse.

I would need a good source for this, since some newspapers in Sweden are rather right-wing with even some quite extreme libertarian columnists.

Gothenburg University JMK surveys all all journalists in Sweden, and last time:

41 procent Miljöpartiet (green party, left-wing) 15 procent Vänsterpartiet (communist, extreme left)

Public Service Radio Sveriges Radio: 54 procent Miljöpartiet (green party, left-wing) Public Service TV Sveriges Television: 52 procent Miljöpartiet (green party, left-wing)

http://www.journalisten.se/nyheter/svenska-journalister-fore...

If you asked Swedish police, you'd get much lower support for extreme right and pure racism than the national average. They probably aren't lower, but they know that these opinions aren't tolerated.

Swedish journalists are very much aware of that left extremist opinions is sensitive for their profession.

Get your facts straight. Miljöpartiet is NOT considered left-wing, but centre-left, closer to the conservative-liberal block than the labour part.

Vänstetpartiet is a classical leftist party, there's nothing "extremist" about them.

So we should accept your "facts" with a "straight" face...? :-)

At least the V party stopped being Stalinists early -- directly when Moscow told them that Stalin was bad...

At least the Vänster party started early to harshly criticize the dictatorships in East Europe -- in 1989...

Let us talk about money and cultural exchange with dictators? Or about suppressing the information from the few surviving volunteers that went to Soviet in the 1930s? (Which did continue after 1989.)

At least V isn't changing opinions always whenever the wind changes -- not even after 1989 have they ever supported a democracy against a dictatorship!

And so on.

That is normal and "not extremist" in your definition?!

Thanks for a good laugh.

A bit earlier than 1989; the Left Party split with the Soviets in the 1960s, and became frequent critics after that. They were one of the loudest European left parties condemning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example.

You only had a complaint about one point of all those? :-)

It is funny when you show someone completely wrong with lots of examples -- and just get a down vote. If I have a thesis in life by now, it is that idealists lie, not only to themselves,

About your claim that V broke up with the East European dictators:

V had camps, got alcohol, money etc from those dictatorships after they "broke up". They took some principal decision in the 1980s about not having enough resources to analyze and criticize "everything everywhere"... And so on.

I lost my saved newspaper clippings from the period in a move (not much was ever written about all this in Swedish media). But you can easily add more. Like that Ohly had an anti Semite as favorite blogger (until it was pointed out to him), etc.

I read one of the articles via Google Translate. I have no previous experience with the site, but when the article claimed that the Swedish authorities don't care about rape particularly if the victim is Swedish then it seemed to me to be rather cliche right-wing scaremongering.

Just because crime is up doesnt mean crimes that you go for prison for are up. Especially since they have become way more lenient with the sentences the past years.

Beware of the political spin!

The article cited is from 2008 and so nearly five years outdated. The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1]. The biggest problem I see is that the the article glosses over the reasons for such a change. There are multiple reasons why crime statistics change, some merely methodological, but chief among them are two factors:

* Changes in criminal law, classifying new kinds of behavior as a crime or decriminalizing some behavior. (Hello Marihuana legalization!)

* Willingness to report a crime. What used to be a run in among adolescents is nowadays often reported as a violent crime. Any kind of rape or sexual molestation used to be such a stigma on the victim that they were (and still often are) not reported.

Same goes for the rate of solved crimes: A figure of "6%" just glosses over the details. It seems low, but what's more interesting is which crimes get solved. Bike theft has a notoriously low rate of solving the crime (1%) [2] and is very common in some regions, skewing statistics. Same for petty theft. Drug abuse is often reported as a crime. There's no chance to ever solving such crimes on a significant level. Also, how does "6%" compare to the years before? Better? Same? Less?

So be weary when reading and citing those articles. Usually, if only one figure gets cited, you're being mislead.

[1] http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statisti... [2] http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statisti...

I love your source.

>The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1].

From your source: "Since 2003, the number of reported offences has increased by approximately 147,000 (+12%). Since 1975, the trend in the total number of reported offences has been characterised by a continuous increase."

That a 1% decrease in the statistics of a single year represent any significant change in the trend since 1975 remains to be seen. I'm very skeptical but I will be very happy if it turns out to be true.

Between 2003 and 2013, the Swedish population grew by 7.8%, which should be taken into account when looking at absolute numbers of reported crimes.

You're glossing over my main point: Picking a single number without context or interpretation from a statistic is devoid of any meaning.

The statistic measures "reported crimes" as a total value, not even per capita. That's a very long shot from "committed crimes". It's really just only what people report, if it's a crime or not. The number of reported crimes is most likely below the number of actual crimes for most crimes. It's a statistic which must be regarded with big caution. It's an indicator and as such has a value, but without context and analysis the number itself is basically meaningless. Take for example "fraud with help of internet" - that's a crime that basically didn't exist in 2003. It probably wasn't codified in law until much later and it's one of the fastest growing categories. Such changes skew the statistics, context is important. Even the reverse in trend may be due to external factors such as less people reporting drug abuse as a crime.

I agree that crime statistics are highly context sensitive and must be handled with caution. Sweden's rape statistics are a good example. Sweden has more rapes per capita than most countries, it's even the second highest in the world. However, that's because Sweden's definition of rape is including so much more than any other country. Ask Julian Assange about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Sweden

That new crimes are codified in law, such as "internet fraud", and is one of the fastest growing seems to causing more crimes, not fewer. It doesn't invalidate the comparison between years for all crimes, and unless you want to argue that newly codified crimes are less serious than old ones, I can't really see a problem with new laws being included in statistics, too.

I'd like to conclude saying that I appreciate your posts on this subject and have read them with interest.

>>However, [the statistics are the 2nd highest on the planet] because Sweden's definition of rape is including so much more than any other country.

I've seen that claim often, but never some real facts which compares data. You don't have any, either?

That new crimes are codified in law, such as "internet fraud", and is one of the fastest growing seems to causing more crimes, not fewer. It doesn't invalidate the comparison between years for all crimes, and unless you want to argue that newly codified crimes are less serious than old ones,

There is no problem per se in including newly codified crimes in statistics. It's also perfectly fine that that this causes a rise in those statistics. It still compels caution when reading those statistics:

Let's best take a totally contrived example: Beginning with the first of December, eating Surströmming is forbidden due to new environmental protection laws. This will cause a sudden spike in the crime statistics because once acceptable behavior is now outlawed. It also causes the police to suddenly solve a higher percentage of crimes since the perpetrators are easily identifiable by their smell. Did the world get better? Worse? The statistic just tells us a naked number.

Something similar happens with fraud with help of the internet and probably more with illegal access to computer systems: People were doing it before, but it never showed up in the statistics since even though it was still as bad of a behavior as it is now, it was not illegal since there was no appropriate law.

Figures for rape and sexual molestation are rising? What does that mean? More people getting raped? Or does it mean that even though less people are raped, a higher percentage are in the position to report it? The definition of rape has - rightfully - been broadened in the last decade. In germany, rape in a marriage was only codified as "rape" in 1997 (!) (in words: nineteen nintyseven). That certainly causes a rise in the relevant statistics, but it doesn't mean that more women are raped - it just means that visibility has increased. (which, by the way, is a good thing in itself)

That's what I mean by "context matters". You can't derive any meaning from the naked numbers. In the extreme case, a rise in crime stats may "just" mean that the society decided to outlaw some specific behavior. In reality it's probably a mixed bag of a lot of reasons.

EDIT: Formatting for the quote.

Wikipedia's citation in that section[1] says that Swedes are more likely to report crimes, but have a similar actual amount of crimes.

"Sweden stands out within the entire area of crimes against the person in particular, because the registration of crime is more extensive than in the majority of other countries in Europe. This forms the background to, for example, the fact that ten times as many cases of assault are registered in Sweden as in Greece."

"But in the victim survey that exists that permits basic comparison between levels of exposure to sex crimes in ten European countries, Sweden does not top the list, as in the reporting statistics. Instead, Sweden is around the average mark, which is also the case for assaults and threats, despite the fact that compared to other countries, we have many such crimes reported. However, the fact that we are not any worse than many other countries does not mean that the situation is good. If any rape is committed, the level is too high."

[1] http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/news-from-bra/arch...

> Hello Marihuana legalization

is it legal in Sweden?

Don't thinks so, but I wanted to cite a real-world example of decriminalization that is actually happening in at least some jurisdictions on that planet. That was the first one that came to my mind. Others include

* decriminalization of same-sex intercourse (gay, lesbian).

* general decriminalization of drugs (think portugal)

Very much the opposite. In Sweden, even alcohol is a controlled substance and you may recall pressure being put on NL for allowing foreign people to consume cannabis in coffee shops (mainly in Amsterdam), well that pressure was from Sweden who saw the practise as a way for Swedes to get around their laws by flying to Amsterdam for a weekend (although just across the border in Copenhagen, a Swede can buy cannabis at Christiana, it isn't legalized or officially decriminalized, but the police only enforce a few arrests every few years as long as there is no violence or other drugs, no such pressure was placed on Denmark).

It is a throwback to notions from the 19th century, puritanical christian Sweden where the notion was that Swedes have an 'addict gene'.

You can legally have sex with animals though, it isn't even seen as cruel, the thinking back in 1945 when bestiality was legalized with sodomy was why should an otherwise good man be plagued because he has sex with animals (or homosexual sex). Obviously this thinking wouldn't fly in other western nations as the concept of cruelty and consent are very different. I think they are in the process of changing this now, so maybe in a few years they will fall in line with other aspects of international policy as well.

> It is a throwback to notions from the 19th century, puritanical christian Sweden where the notion was that Swedes have an 'addict gene'.

19th century Sweden was not "puritanical Christian". The ideas of absolute temperance entered through influences from the Anglo-Saxon world, local temperance organizations mostly advocated alcohol use in moderation.

I believe that the idea of Swedes being especially prone to addition also is something recent, but here I am out of my depth. I have not heard it used often by temperance activists and Christians either.

I agree that "puritanical" isn't appropriate for Swedish Lutheranism, but I suspect the previous poster was using "puritanical" more loosely, as a rough antonym to "hedonistic" and not as a specific religious movement or influence.

I'm not sure though about your statement "mostly advocated alcohol use in moderation."

There was the Swedish prohibition referendum in 1922. Just under 50% of the voters wanted an absolute prohibition on "rusdrycker". That includes spirits, wine, and strong beer. The referendum was "För eller mot införande av fullständigt rusdrycksförbud" - "for or against the introduction of the complete prohibition of intoxicating drinks."

(I'm uncertain how to translate 'rusdryck.' I think 'intoxicating drinks' is best, vs. "drinks with alcohol." A rusdryck is currently defined in Sweden (since 1944) as drinks with at least 2.25% alcohol by volume. I don't know what it meant in 1922. IOGT put it at 2% back in the late 1880.

For comparison, in the US the 1919 Volstead Act set the limit as 0.5%, while the 1933 Cullen-Harrison Act raised it to 3.2% by weight (=4% by volume), just a few months before the amendment overturning Prohibition. For that short time, US prohibition laws were less strict than what Sweden would have had.)

In any case, I don't think it's the same as saying that the temperance movements advocated for "alcohol use in moderation." Most of the temperance movements seem to have been for the ban, and relatively fewer temperance organizations (like the "Landsföreningen för folknykterhet utan förbud" - "National Association of Public Temperance Without Prohibition") against it.

As for the Christian influence, from what I can tell, while there were Christian organization in the early 1800s which advocated less alcohol use, it wasn't until the the "new" temperance movements of the late 1800s, with strong US influences, that people advocated for a complete ban. Some, like NGTO, were more specifically Christian than others. I think the modern IOGT-NTO is not Christian, though there are still Christian-based temperance movements in Sweden. As I recall, most people in the more religious area of Sweden voted for the ban, but that could also be an agriculture/small-town vs. industrial/big-city divide.

The modern temperance movement is, as you say, not the same as 100 years ago. IOGT-NTO advocates for reduced use of alcohol, and for the existence of alcohol-free places (like meeting halls). It does not advocate for the ban of alcohol.

As the other poster mentioned, I was using puritanical to mean strict religious ideas and not the Puritan movement. You will notice I capitalised Sweden but not the word puritanical as it was not a proper noun.

"puritanical" is an adjective, not a noun. :)

I also noticed that you referred to an "addict gene" as a 19th century notion, but the term "gene" wasn't coined until the 20th century.

In any case, no I wasn't aware of a 19th century Sweden based on strict religious ideas. Could you tell me more? My understanding is that the state was working to suppress Pietism in the Lutheran church, and persist with rationalism.

Pietism and Puritanism are similar, and Pietism is a forerunner to the modern evangelical movement in the US, which is why I didn't think that 1800s Sweden had those same sorts of strict religious ideas about one's daily life.

Rather, there were strict religious laws, yes, but they were strict in asserting how Lutheranism was the official church and that there is no other church. Quoting Wikipedia:

In order to curb Pietism several Royal Decrees and Acts of Parliament were proclaimed in the 18th century, which forbid Swedish citizens to practice any religion besides mandatory Lutheran Sunday Mass attendance and daily family devotions. Without the presence of a Lutheran clergyman public religious gatherings were forbidden. It remained illegal until 1860 for Lutheran Swedes to convert to another confession or religion. From then, and unto 1951, it was legal to leave the Church of Sweden for the purpose of becoming a member of another officially recognised religious denomination.

I'm interested in Swedish history, though I don't know all that much about it, so I look forward to your explanation.

Yes, puritanical is an adjective but the Puritan movement is a proper noun as it is the name of a movement. That is the point I was making. In English the phrase 'proper noun' does not mean I was implying the word puritanical was a noun, it means I was saying it is not a name (which we capitalize and call proper nouns), and therefore I was using it as an adjective. I hope that clears up your confusion.

As for the "addict gene", again, this was supposed to be a synonym phrase for a notion of hereditary weakness, I was not implying it has a genetic basis or that genetics was known before Crick. The phrase "addict gene" was quoted because I have heard it in Sweden (in modern times) when discussing these issues.

I'm hardly an expert on Swedish history, just a person who asks questions when I travel. What I know of Swedish history could be written on the back of a postage stamp. I'm afraid I wasted more time on Roman history in school (as you can imagine, Swedish history doesn't come up very often).

Genetics was most certainly known before Crick. Indeed, the terms "genetics" and "gene" were coined over a decade before Crick was born, and the first research was by Mendel about 50 years before Crick's birth.

I have not heard of a specifically Swedish addict gene, and I've lived in Sweden for over 6 years. Searching now, I found no mention of that concept, including searching for "missbrukare gen". Surely some may have said it, but it's not a widely held belief that's part of the debate on substance abuse.

And of course this part of the thread started because you made a statement about puritanical Swedish religious beliefs of the 1800s, when it appears that religious beliefs in Sweden during that time were decidedly anti-pietism/anti-puritanical.

What I conclude from all this is that you feel that your generalizations are correct, even though your details are not, and you make statements without worrying about checking those facts, or feeling that you need to explain the reasoning behind your generalizations.

Perfectly fine for you do to that, but it's not the conversation I wanted, or want, to have.

What I conclude from this is you don't know what a proper noun is in English and you are offended at conclusions drawn from my experience in Sweden, which are of course anecdotal and therefor not applicable to everyone in Sweden, why would you assume I was asserting the opposite?

I guess you didn't do much searching if you couldn't find this study[1] from Lund University or this study[2] from Gothenburg University.

From your sophmoric questioning and pedantic ramblings it seems your mind was made up before you even heard the answer.

> Perfectly fine for you do to that, but it's not the conversation I wanted, or want, to have.

Well to be fair I wasn't trying to have a conversation with you, and again, to be fair, you didn't do anything to add something to the general conversation besides your mild nationalism. Classy.

[1] http://www.research.med.lu.se/en_projektdetaljer.php?Proj=65...

[2] http://www.psy.gu.se/english/current/news/newsdetail//gene-i...

> Research carried out by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (‘Cold Facts’) investigative news programme also revealed that violent crimes and robberies make up about 75 percent of all crimes reported in Sweden.

Those numbers are bullshit. If we look at Brå's statistics (http://www.bra.se/download/18.22a7170813a0d141d21800063138/1...) we see that:

  Total crimes 2012: 1156390
  Other+petty theft:  317869 27.5%
  Vandalism:          152345 13.2%
  Fraud:              129063 11.2%
  --
  Robbery:              9213  0.8%

Solved in such statistics may not mean what many thinks it means. Crimes where the perpetrator is known, but there is not enough evidence to take him to court are also often counted as solved.

At least here in Norway (neighbor country to Sweden), of the solved cases, about half was reported by the police itself. That normally mean that the police caught one in the act, or was them self the victim of the crime (the defendant resisted arrest, attacked or threatened a police officer etc.).

So if you are a victim of a crime, and no police officer witnesses it, it isn't very likely that the perpetrator get punished.

> the five countries with the highest prison population are the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India.

Blimey, who'd have thought the countries with some of the highest population will have the most inmates. Then it continues with the per capita numbers which are a much better comparison but conveniently leaves out the per capita number for Sweden which according to the numbers in the articles is around 50 -- and India is 30! Not a nice/relevant comparison.

According to Wikipedia, apparently based on the same list just at a different rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat... India is fact one of the lowest per capita.

Murders are down 50% from 1990s, and the number of victims of street violence is down 30% the last 5 years. But these numbers are not unique for Sweden. The one type of violence that is up is for organized crime. http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/antalet-mord-halverat-sedan... (list of references in swedish)

But yes, we have a very ineffective police force, everyone knows this. We have more police personnel then ever (huge increase the last years). But solved crimes are less, or the same.

Note also that we can't use self defense like in the US. It is impossible to get any kind of license for pepper spray, taser (cops not allowed either), guns, anything you can defend yourself with. Makes it easy to be a criminal in Sweden.

Do you think that an armed general population would decrease violence and your risk of receiving it?

> Makes it easy to be a criminal in Sweden.

But apparently not easy enough for to actually encourage people to commit crimes.

Minor drug offenders are more often fined than jailed.

A friend got caught in his apartment with a grow op, drying cannabis, illegal mushrooms, other drugs and he ended up serving no time at all.

His time will be financial, he will have to pay off his debt to society literally instead of being incarcerated.

AFAIK that's what happens in the US too -- if you happen to be white.

and/or wealthy

I have a friend, he happens to be white:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUvsrcxKmI

Cut the bullshit, guy. An offense like the guy described would land anyone doing time anywhere in the US, first offense or not.

I think that's the same in a lot of EU countries. Too many people think those kind of drugs should be legalized anyway, so if the grow operation is not too large (10 instead of 1000 plants for instance), they won't do too much. Which I think is a good thing.

What sort of debt is that? It's well and good if it is something which has been approved by the lawmakers, courts and population, but I am skeptical of making offenders pay very large fines. In effect, it turns into a (potentially lifelong) punishment.

See e.g. the piratebay founders, none of which will ever be able to own property or any assets at all, seeing as even the interest payments on the damages they owe are more than the average salary. Sentencing someone to lifelong economic slavery is not a good thing in my book. It is a very, very harsh punishment. In effect, the piratebay founders have been sentenced to exile.

I don't know, and I'm not saying it's a good thing. All I can say for sure is that I don't want to see people jailed for all drug offences.

I was glad to see that the recent article kindly submitted here gives the inmate count for Sweden, and Sweden's population.

"According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million."

So I looked up my home state of Minnesota's inmate count and population for a rough comparison.

"State corrections officials are quick to point out that Minnesota’s incarceration rate is the second lowest in the nation and to note how favorably Minnesota compares with our neighbor to the east. As of July 1, Minnesota had a prison population of 9,772 and a prison budget of $457 million a year. In contrast, Wisconsin has a prison population of about 23,000 and a prison budget of $1.2 billion."[1] Minnesota has a population of 5.379 million. In general, the state prison population in the United States is declining,[2] with Maine currently being the state with the lowest rate of incarceration, and Minnesota's recently fluctuating rate being the second-lowest. Some states have much higher rates of incarceration, so the overall United States rate is high.

As the article submitted here suggests, and as the articles I'm linking here suggest too, all over the world it can reduce incarceration rates to not punish minor drug offenses with incarceration. A determinate sentencing system that emphasizes severity of crimes like Minnesota's[3] keeps first-time, nonviolent offenders out of prison and reserves prison for repeat offenders with known history of violent offenses.

How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.

[1] http://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2013/08/how-minnesot...

[2] http://www.startribune.com/local/216949031.html

[3] http://mn.gov/sentencing-guidelines/images/2013%2520Guidelin...

Interestingly Minnesota has the largest population of Swedish descendents in the US.

Source?

> How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.

I'm genuinely curious, I'm honestly not trolling, is this state of affairs remarkable in the US these days? Is this really an accomplishment? Is it worse in general?

It's not remarkable in most small towns and rural areas. Big cities are more of a mixed bag - there is always "the bad part of town" with very high crime rates, but the middle-class suburbs (where a great many HN users live) usually have rates of violent crime comparable to western Europe. Naturally the prison population comes almost entirely from those bad neighborhoods, and so our insane incarceration rates are mostly invisible to the suburb dwellers.

Thanks!

Another bullshit article. Crime in Sweden is insane, I don't feel safe anymore.

We barely jail anyone for crimes, it's always fines and community bullshit service when it should be prison.

A lot of people will find this offensive, but it's mostly because of immigration. Sweden has a one of the most liberal immigration policies in Europe, with more and more immigrants coming in every year, and crime is increasing relatively fast. It's not just correlation: serious crime (violence, theft) is overrepresented in immigrant groups, especially African and Asian immigrants, who are also less likely to serve prison sentences. There are statistics available for all these claims but I'll probably just be labelled a racist and ignored so I won't bother finding them.

You are being racist. What you're saying is that immigrants are somehow more inclined to commit crimes simply because they're immigrants. That _is_ a racist statement and you're also ignoring the real reason.

The reason crime is increasing is that Sweden has become a more unequal and segregated society. Immigrants have been hit harder by this development because of, for example, discrimination on the job market.

So basically you should stop complaining about the immigration policy and start demanding equality.

Enforcing equality has historically shown to have the opposite effect. Thomas Sowell, an African American (discrimination is more prevalent in the states) has written extensively about this, as have many others regarding quotas and other forms of forced 'equality'. So no, I won't demand equality, also because I believe in the fact that employers should have the freedom to hire whoever they want without state regulation.

I really don't like this mentality of entitlement, and the excusing of any negative aspects of poorer groups on the richer. Interestingly this behaviour is more passionate in the middle classes than from people who are actually living in poverty. Ted Kaczynski talks about this.

So you think it's perfectly fine to refuse to hire somebody just because of their ethnicity? Wow.

Also, just because you can find one right wing economist supporting your view doesn't mean you're right. There's an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the fact that inequality leads to higher crime rates.

I'm sort of starting to think that you're really just trolling, seeing how Ted Kaczynski is a convicted serial killer with pretty crazy idea. Not someone I'd use to back my ideas in a discussion. I guess you have to use whatever you can get your hands on.

Yes, I think employers should be able to refuse somebody based on ethnicity, whether I agree with the act itself or not is irrelevant, I believe in the freedom to do so. My personal opinions regarding employment do not affect my belief that you can't force equality.

One economist supporting my view doesn't make me right, okay, but you haven't really added anything, you just labelled him right-wing and left it there, probably because being right-wing means being wrong to you. The arguments and evidence is there though.

Your posts are full of logical fallacies, another one is present in your last paragraph (ad hominem - is Kaczynski's work on maths now wrong too because he murdered someone?), so I'm going to stop responding to you. I've had these arguments with liberals too often, where they accuse me being an evil, immoral person because I don't think a better society will result from just giving and giving until everybody's seemingly equal.

Your economist being right wing is relevant because most libertarians refuse to acknowledge the positive effects of equality. Noting that a source is biased is a valid point.

I agree that pointing out that Kaczynski is an insane serial killer who forced a bunch of papers to publish his anarcho-primitivist manifesto by threatening to keep bombing people (WTF?) doesn't prove he's a poor mathematician. However, we're not talking about his maths skills. Being a brilliant mathematician doesn't really make you an expert on social issues.

"Economic inequality is positively and significantly related to rates of homicide despite an extensive list of conceptually relevant controls. The fact that this relationship is found with the most recent data and using a different measure of economic inequality from previous research, suggests that the finding is very robust." - Wikipedia

While not everything on Wikipedia is true, it's certainly a less biased source than the ones you refer to.

> libertarians refuse to acknowledge the positive effects of equality

You just made this up, or, you don't understand the difference between trying to force equality and equality itself. Equality may have positive effects, trying to force it upon people does not, this is a well-documented phenomenon Example, colleges - entry requirements are lowered in top colleges for Black students, who, in turn, have higher drop out rates because they can't keep up.

>While not everything on Wikipedia is true, it's certainly a less biased source than the ones you refer to.

This is the equivalent of saying "your sources are biased, mine are not" to affirm your socialist ideas.

1) Equality doesn't "just happen". It's something that must be actively pursued. Basically all equality is "forced".

Also, the type of positive discrimination that you describe is irrelevant to this discussion. Your ramblings on "forced equality" were in response to my view that you shouldn't discriminate job applicants because of their ethnicity.

The absence of discrimination is not the same thing as positive discrimination.

2) Whether or not my ideas are socialist (I think "progressive" is a better word) is irrelevant here. The truth is, I can back my claims with credible sources. You cannot.

whatever... start by repaying the slaves 500 years of forced work without pay, then we can start talking about entitlement.

Oh sorry ! you're right,they were housed and feed lol...

berrypicker my a ...

The reparations for slavery argument is a bit of a cop out.

Swedes didn't import any black slaves (I know of), do they still have to take part in repaying?

They are inclined to commit crimes because they are poor and because they fit poorly. Both things are because they are immigrants.

If you bring 10 mln new immigrants into a country tomorrow, of course they will all resort to crime - you didn't provide them with a job and maybe there isn't a job for them, you didn't let them entangle with the rest of population, etc... Even when viewing from non-racist POV it should be obvious one should be very careful with bringing in large qualities of immigrants, especially poor and undereducated ones. When you do, everyone will suffer including already-integrated immigrants from previous wave.

"Immigrant" is not a "race".

That said, a very recent report in the UK shows that immigrants are more productive and add value in the UK, contrary to right wing hate mongering. No idea if that is the same anywhere else, but it does show a difference between what we are told and the actual economic facts.

While it is true that "immigrant" is not a "race", the idea that swedes are inherently less criminal than all other ethnicities is still racist.

One might argue that "racist" should be replaced with the term "xenophobic" or something like that. However the underlying assumption is still that some groups are "better" than others simply because of their ethnicity.

Hmm, crime is present in highly dense, poor areas, color me surprised. /sarc

Crime is increasing because the society can't integrate them fast enough. It's literally same deal before abortions were an option. More people, less resource on a local level, leads to crime growing. This has nothing to do with the minorities, but how they are being handled.

Most immigrants come to Sweden for a better quality of life, and they get it: the government gives them housing, social services, education, money etc. Any place in Sweden, even these 'highly dense, poor areas' you're talking about, are better than where most immigrants originate.

Yet you blame the rest of society for not 'integrating' them better? I also hate this constant attributing of violent crime to poverty. There are high poverty-low crime areas in many countries. If you're willing to blame crime on some cultural aspect of society, but only in some cases, then it's a double standard.

> I also hate this constant attributing of violent crime to poverty.

This seems like an empirical question, not something to like or hate. Does poverty drive crime? Is reducing poverty effective in reducing crime? If yes, then I would say that is a good place for policies to focus.

I know more about Denmark (where I live) than Sweden, but here poor areas do seem to be by far the source of most crime, and that applies to both immigrants and non-immigrants who live there. The social problems in the different communities manifest somewhat differently, but both native & immigrant communities in the "bad" parts of Copenhagen have social problems. The biggest difference seems to just be that they join different gangs: ethnic Danes in areas with high degrees of social problems get involved in mainly-Danish biker gangs, while immigrants with social problems get involved in mainly-immigrant gangs. A large feature of Copenhagen crime in recent years has been the Danish and immigrant gangs fighting for control of the drug market. (Prior to that, the Danish gangs fought among themselves for it, so immigrants didn't start this particular problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Nordic_Biker_War)

How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the lamp bulmb must want to be changed.

How do you integrate someone unwilling to do so?

Not sure what the shrink comment is about :/

How do you know they are unwilling? Have you tried? What are your proof they are unwilling?

Any system can say well we tried but they are unwilling or repent-less. What applies in this example applies to US. Their system tries its best but gosh darn it, those repent-less Hispanic and Blacks are unwilling to repent in face of prison. It's very easy for people to delude themselves of their greatness.

We in sweden also have Victim Cardigans. A type of clothing that is worn by those people who types "SD2014" in internet comment fields. This item allows the wearer to dodge discussions because the wearer is a victim of the "PK-maffia" a hypothesized shadow organization that enforces only politically correct viewpoints regarding immigration and disallows the wearer from expressing harsh "truths". In reality Sweden has a very open discussion climate and every viewpoint is accepted as valid, however stupid and/or inhumane. Problems regarding immigration are frequently discussed, however the majority opinion is that crime rates that seemingly correlate with immigration are better explained with class and economic/social situation than ethnicity. So those who have racist views are a minority (at the moment) and therefore, according to themselves, oppressed. But the color of the Victim Cardigan that berrypicker proudly wears, it's magnificent!

"crime rates that seemingly correlate with immigration are better explained with class and economic/social situation than ethnicity"

You don't have to be racist, you can go all progressive: don't bring people in country that would decrease its human development level. Only bring those who will contribute and blend in.

test

Providing statistics does not make you a racist. Providing false claims such as "crime is increasing relatively fast" (reported crimes decreased by 1% in 2012 compared to the year before) while trying to attribute this to immigrant groups does.

As for statistics, people with little to no income are also "overrepresented" in crime. Who would have guessed.

Like somebody else said in the thread, look at crimes like homicide and theft, whose definition are uncontroversial. Crime is rising.

>År 2012 konstaterades 68 fall av dödligt våld i Sverige, vilket är en minskning jämfört med år 2011, då 81 fall konstaterades. Nivån för 2012 är den lägsta noteringen under de senaste tio åren.

>Antalet fall av dödligt våld uppvisar relativt stora upp- och nedgångar mellan olika år och har den senaste tioårsperioden fluktuerat mellan 68 och 107 fall årligen.

>I ett längre perspektiv uppvisar det dödliga våldet en nedåtgående utveckling.

Source: http://www.bra.se/bra/brott--statistik/mord-och-drap.html

Sorry for the Swedish but basically: Long term the deadly violence has had a downwards trend.

Where are your statistics that they are rising?

Well, the only crime that has a really uncontroversial definition would be criminal homicide (certainly a small number could be misattributed to suicide, but still - a dead person is a dead person, no "made up" charges, no non-filed charges). So... according to BRÅ (Crime-prevention council, the government agency in charge of crime-related statistics in Sweden, the following can be said about homicide in Sweden:

- The number of homicides (all kinds) in Sweden 2012 was 68. That is an all time low. - The average over the past 20 years is around 95 homicides per year (and declining) - Adding to that is that the Swedish population has risen with 10.5% the last 20 years (8.7M to 9.6M), meaning the per-capita crime rate has dropped even more - Especially noteworthy is the drop in homicides of children under 15

I would not say theft has an uncontroversial definition, at least not nearly as uncontroversial as homicide...

There's nothing offensive about it, this certainly is plausible and need not be due to any inherent racial differences. But you really should back up your claims with evidence rather than copping out as in your last sentence. If anything the omission of statistics makes it more likely someone will attack you rather than debate the facts.

The statistics on this are fairly clear, but not very well published. It would certainly be possible to dig them up, but a comprehensive review would require a bit of work. You could find this in the official statistics, but newspaper folks are reluctant to compile them and put them on the front page.

In Norway, the per-capita rate of violent robberies, burglaries and violent rape is overwhelmingly larger in immigrant populations than the native. But it's a bit taboo to discuss this in polite company.

And yet, when you control for other biases (like income level, employment status, adult figures in household), this difference between immigrants and non-immigrants seem to disappear... almost like the defining factor is not where you (or your parents) were born, but more like your relative position in the society. Strange, huh?

Can you prove this? It's the first time I have heard someone make this claim, although it seems like something which is reasonable to test for.

I'd say it's generally believed to be the truth in Sweden, however, it's a heavily politicized question. Crime statistics are very complex and immigration is such a political hot potato that mixing the two together makes it nearly unworkable.

Proving criminals are innocent victims of poverty and class is difficult unless you are of Marxist persuasion. Statistics related to immigration and crime are obscure, as definitions of crimes change and entire classes of statistics are forbidden to do for political reasons (e.g. tracking offender's race or religion)

However, one point of view is that it's the opposing viewpoint that must be proven. It's also hard to prove that being "immigrant" or "non-european" is causing you to be a criminal, unless you are a nationalist.

Personally, I'd say it's asking the wrong question. We want to reduce crime and poverty, and the question is how to do it. If it was easy to prevent poverty, it would be done already. And frankly, if Sweden hasn't prevented poverty "enough" when non-working immigrants are provided with food, clothes, housing, cable-TV and mobile phones, then when is it really prevented?

Example sources: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/gruppsida.aspx?programid=3615&g... http://www.svd.se/opinion/ledarsidan/brottslighet-bland-inva... http://www.advokatsamfundet.se/Advokaten/Tidningsnummer/2010... http://www.bgf.nu/faktabanken/kriminalitet/brabra2.html

and I'm not writing a dissertation in sociology here, unless you want to give me enough bitcoins :)

Let's assume what you say is true, why, still, should I support immigration, when almost all immigrants are from social groups where 'income level, employment status, adult figures in household' are in a range where crime is high?

Not imprisoning people for minor crime is sane as criminals incarcerated have a higher chance of relapsing into crime than those who recieved suspended sentences. The goal of the justice system should be to prevent crime, not to dish out revenge because it feels good.

Yeah! For instance, the homicide rate in Sweden is about 1 per 100k, whereas the rate in the USA is only 4.7 per 100k. (1.2 in the UK, 3.5 in Europe as a whole, 6.9 worldwide, 1.5 for Northern Europe, the subregion to which Sweden belongs.)

(Why look at homicide specifically? Because almost all cases get reported and the definition of homicide is fairly uncontroversial. With some other crimes -- rape is a particularly bad example -- definitions and reporting rates may vary wildly from country to country.)

Regrettably, how safe you feel is strongly influenced by what you see in the media, hear from your friends and family, etc., and unless you are exceptionally careful about your mental hygiene and pay a lot of attention to the relevant statistics the connection between how safe you feel and how safe you actually are is probably quite weak.

The problem is that looking at national numbers is not representative of most people's experience. For example, my "town" of 140,000 (Cary, NC) has only had one murder in the past five years and is currently listed as the safest city in the US with population between 100,000-500,000 (http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/29/3323828/cary-claims-l...). I personally mostly ignore the police but keep them in mind as a civic resource to leverage for answers about things I don't know how to find out any other way. In a small, safe city, calling the non-emergency line can be a useful source of information. Heck, the electric service powering my neighborhood is run by the neighboring town of Apex, and their off-hours emergency line redirects to the Apex police department, who presumably handle coordinating outage reports with the emergency techs and line workers. I'm not trying to claim things are Andy-Griffith-in-Mayberry, but it's certainly closer to that than the other extreme.

Besides actual skewing, you have localized situations where the relationship of the police to the citizens (and media) is personal, friendly, helpful, and generally constructive. For every "stop and frisk" type story there's a cop helping a stranded single mother change a tire, etc.

This is truly bullshit. Violent crimes in Sweden is at an all-time low. The primary reason for some statistics to indicate raising crime-rates is that the tendency to report a crime has risen a lot lately (a very good thing). The fact that you're feeling this way is purely due to a shift in how Swedish media reports on crime (30 years ago an assault in a smaller Swedish city would not make the national news, now it's very much highlighted), which in this Internet era of connectivity makes you feel a lot more is happening in your near vicinity.

Allow me to be blunt:

Who the hell cares how safe you FEEL?

That's just a reflection of how much the media has coloured your view on how much crime is prevalent. Says next to nothing about how safe you actually are, which is the only important statistic.

> Who the hell cares how safe you FEEL?

You should, how safe you feel is part of your quality of life. It's correct that it may not reflect objective statistics, and that it's influenced by media, but the fact remains.. how you feel affects your life.

For example the situation with healthcare. Your health insurance adds to your quality of life even when you are not using it.

You are always using your health insurance. Saying that you aren't using your health insurance when you are not currently filling out a form to pay for a doctor's visit or hospital stay is like saying that you're not using your car when your foot isn't currently on the gas.

Your "bluntness" added little except rudeness to the discussion. You could have expressed this point in a much less contentious way.

>Who the hell cares how safe you FEEL?

Right-wing populist anti-immigrant political parties.

China exceeds the Unites states by more than 1 billion people in terms of population yet the US jail more people than China?!

This seems shocking to say the least.(at least to me)

Yet the US is supposed to be less of a 'policed state' than China.

Have you considered the possibility that higher per capita numbers of jailed people may reflect police officers doing a better job? In China, it may be easier for example to bribe the police or the judge and avoid jail.

That's really not what's going on here. I mean, yes, the US probably has better police officers than China. But the real reason we have higher per capita numbers than anyone else (with the possible exception of North Korea) is not that we (and possibly North Korea) have the world's best police officers. It's that we quadrupled our prison population over the last thirty years (partly by increasing incarceration for drug crimes by 1200%) while the rest of the world ... didn't.

I mean, look at the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

- If you exclude some sub-100K-population countries that probably have weird statistics, the country with the next highest incarceration rate is Cuba, with only 75% the incarceration rate of the US. That's the _next highest_.

- Russia has 67% of our incarceration rate. That's the highest large country other than the US.

- There are only 21 countries that have even half of our incarceration rate, and let's say they're not the ones I think of as having the highest standard of living in the world.

- Looking at the western nations that the US traditionally compares itself to (depending who you think that is), the highest are probably Spain, England and Wales at 20% of our incarceration rate. Germany is at 11%. France is at 14%.

- In North America, Canada is at 16% of our incarceration rate. Mexico is at 29%.

In other words, we could let out _three out of four prisoners in the United States_, and we would still be locking up more people than any of the nations we consider our peers in terms of wealth, democracy, civil rights, etc.

Given the billions of dollars involved and the millions of lives destroyed and the decades this has been going on, we must by now have some pretty good evidence that our extraordinary, unprecedented strategy is better than the alternative, right? We're applying four times the average dose -- there must be a measurable effect by now.

Right?

The US can account for every prisoner it has. China has a habit of just disappearing people and that isn't reported in their statistics.

I find it shocking that any person living in US (not sure if you do) finds this shocking. Did you not notice; the drug "war", militarization of police, commercialization of prison system, stupendous expansion of seizure laws? Did you not think those have repercussions?

Safety is not the same as feeling safe.

In Britain, about 10-15 years ago, they changed all the emergency services sirens to the same sound as the police have always used. You used to be able to tell the difference between an ambulance, a fire engine and a police car from the sound, now you can't. Also, these days a typical emergency medical response consists of 2 vehicles, a mobile ER doctor followed up by an ambulance.

So my point is that in a densely populated area, like London, it now sounds like the police are all over the place all the time. Actually it's usually a medical response to an elderly person having a fall or heart problems or such like but, because they all sound like police, people assume the worst.

If I were a politician and I wanted to introduce a rational and humane policy for treating the problem of criminality, like they have in Norway, the first thing I would do is change the sirens for all new fire and ambulance vehicle purchases so you can tell the difference from police. Then seed the media with the idea that there are less police sirens than there used to be. People would think crime had dropped precipitously and your policy would feel like it was a success as well as actually being a success.

It´s the supreme court that is not using the whole punishment scale and indirectly emptying the prisons. For Sweds: http://www.fokus.se/issues/2013-43/

This is a pure political gimmick to project their country as one of the safest/crime-free countries. As many have said here, Police is run by the Government and they have the right to manipulate the data.

As a general statistic, if you google it, you'll know the crime rate has been increasing in the last few years. They either fell into dumb ears or they make up by letting the criminals out.

What's the point?

You seem to have a very loose understanding of how the Swedish society works. The Police is not "run by the Government" - it's role in the Swedish society is directed by Polislagen (The Police Law). The Government directs (as it does with all governmental departments) Rikspolisstyrelsen (The National Police Board) via broad (and public) assignments and budgets.

The Government (or the Police) have of course no right to manipulate the data - in Sweden more or less all data is publicly available, and manipulation of crime statistics would be something very noteworthy (and likely to cause a big scandal).

And finally, if you google it, you'll know that crime rates have been decreasing in the last few years (few years meaning 2-3, and looking at all categories of crimes). Over a 10 year period, some categories of crimes have risen (at least the number of reported crimes have risen), and others, like homicide have markedly declined.

Totally agree and buy your points. But the point of downsizing the number of jails is what concerns me. Forget crimes in a larger scale or others like homicide, but minor crimes which are still punishable offenses would be in the rise as more and more the mankind evolves, crimes in any country would also evolve.

Obviously, so does the legal system but people are smart enough to find loopholes and find a way to do.

Almost all of the increase in reported crimes is due to a few specific crimes being reported more now and population growth. Most violent crimes have been decreasing and when asking youths in surveys much fewer admit having participated in crimes compared to when I was the same age.

Meanwhile, fascinating, non-political articles by and for hackers like this one are going more or less unnoticed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691330

No major Swedish news site is covering this. Interesting.

But: http://www.fokus.se/issues/2013-43/

http://www.dn.se/debatt/antalet-fangar-ar-nu-sa-lagt-att-vi-...

More likely the guardian is lagging a few days behind.

You won't be able to do this if the prison are privately run, they need their profits!

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