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Corrections in Two Social Welfare Democracies: Denmark and Sweden

*The author is assistant professor and director of the Criminal Justice Program, La Salle University, Philadelphia. The Scandinavian’ criminal justice systems are often cited as models for the rest of the world. Both Denmark and Sweden have been praised, in particular, for their enlightened and humane correctional policies and practices in American journalistic reports as well as in scholarly publications. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, several articles, based upon governmental reports and brief visits, focused on innovative practices in the two countries which were often limited to one or two institutions and affected a very small number of prisoners. Such descriptions were frequently so uncritical that the prisoners in those institutions would have a difficult time recognizing them, contained factual errors, and failed to link penal policy to the country’s social structure and culture. Since the mid-seventies, however, more complete and objective analyses have appeared, suggesting that, while American corrections may still have a good deal to learn from Denmark and Sweden, their correctional policies and practices have had their problems and failures and are, in any case, only directly applicable to a few state correctional systems in this country. The purpose of this article is to review correctional developments2 in Denmark and Sweden within their social and cultural contexts, and to discuss which promising features of their systems may be transferable to corrections in the United States at a time when we are looking for new directions.