Prison

Prison

Imprisonment is society’s way of punishing those who commit a serious crime. Anyone sentenced to prison loses their freedom for a period of time.

 the prison sentence can be from 14 days to live. The correctional service helps those in prison to adapt to society while we try to counteract the damage that can result from being locked up.

It is a basic idea in Swedish criminal policy to try to avoid locking people up because locking up has harmful effects on the individual. Anyone who is sentenced to a prison sentence instead of a prison sentence ends up in probation. 

Those who are admitted to an institution work, attend training, or undergo treatment. All our efforts should help the convict not to re-offend. That is our most important goal.

Life sentence

Life imprisonment is the strictest punishment under Swedish law. Life imprisonment is not fixed in time, the convict, therefore, does not know how long he or she will be in prison. On 1 October 2020, 152 inmates served life sentences in Sweden. 

Crimes punishable by life imprisonment:

• murder
• gross espionage
• aggravated arson
• gross public danger devastation
• kidnapping
• gross sabotage
• naval, aviation and airport sabotage.

Conversion to fixed-term sentence

After serving at least ten years of the sentence, the convict can apply to have his life sentence suspended. If the district court agrees to the application, the time-limited sentence must not be shorter than 18 years, which is the longest time-limited sentence that can be handed down in Sweden.

All decisions to convert a life sentence into a fixed-term sentence are decided in Örebro District Court. The Department of Correctional Services and the Forensic Medicine Agency comment on, among other things, how the convicted behaved during the sentence and the risk of recidivism in serious crime.

For those who have their life sentence converted to a fixed-term sentence, the same rules apply as for other prison sentences, for example when it comes to parole.

Parole

Inmates normally serve two-thirds of their sentence before being paroled. They then have a probationary period that corresponds to the last period of the prison sentence, but at least one year.

Young people in prison

A person under the age of 15 is not punishable and cannot be convicted of a crime, and young people between the ages of 15 and 17 are uncommon in the correctional system. Instead, they are primarily sentenced to closed youth care in youth homes run by the  State Board of Institutions.

The institutions Luleå and Haparanda are youth institutions. Anstalten Täby has a special department for young people in prison. Most inmates who are placed in a youth institution or youth department are between 18 and 21 years old. The youth wards have treatment and employment specially designed for young people.

Women in prison

The correctional service has separate prisons for women and men. Women who are sentenced to prison serve their sentences in the Hinseberg, Färingsö, Sagsjön, Ljustadalen, Ringsjön or Ystad prisons. There, the staff is trained to be able to meet the special needs of convicted women.

There are significantly fewer women than men serving sentences in prison. The number of women admitted to prison varies between 200 and 300 daily. That is roughly 5 percent of the total number of inmates in Swedish prisons.

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