Abstract
In the field of comparative penology, the Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden—are often marked out as an exception to the general rule. As the story goes, these societies are somehow able to resist a global move towards growing rates of imprisonment and tougher crime control policies. In an award-winning, two-part article in the British Journal of Criminology, New Zealand-based British criminologist John Pratt described the Nordic societies as exhibiting a specifically Nordic culture of control, resulting in what he calls Scandinavian or Nordic ‘exceptionalism’ in the penal area; the exceptional qualities being consistently low rates of imprisonment and comparatively humane prison conditions. Imprisonment rates are, in theory at least, simple enough to compare (let us for the time being bracket the difficulties associated with comparing statistical figures produced by different government agencies in different countries), and many other authors have in fact done so. The novelty of Pratt’s approach was that a more experiential and subjective category—prison conditions—was added to the simple comparison of imprisonment rates.
The book under review—written with Swedish-born and Australia-based criminologist Anna Eriksson—expands and elaborates on the exceptionalism thesis as introduced in Pratt’s original BJC articles. The main point is, still, that the prison regimes in two clusters of societies are systematically different. The societies making up what the authors call the ‘Anglophone cluster’—England, New Zealand and Australia—are more punitive. Their prisons are simple and austere, and their politicians are keen to be seen as credibly ‘tough on crime’. The societies making up the ‘Nordic cluster’—Finland, Norway and Sweden—are more welfare oriented, and their prisons are celebrated for being relatively safe and humane institutions that provide decent living conditions for prisoners or, depending on whom you ask, notorious for being soft holiday camps for murderers and rapists. The main argument put forward by Pratt and Eriksson is that the prisons in the two clusters of societies are systematically dissimilar because they have grown out of, and are part of, two fundamentally different types of social orders.
The assertion that a prison is part of the society in which it is situated should not come as a surprise to anyone, and the main argument could be read as a new version of the old truism variously attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nelson Mandela (undoubtedly among others): the state of the prison system will tell you a lot about a society, or, differently put, show me your prisons, and I will tell you who you are.
Pratt and Eriksson should be lauded for including prison conditions in the comparative discussion of punitiveness, and their book unfolds in the following manner: Chapter 1 introduces the exceptionalism thesis. Chapter 2 is an historical account of the broad social and cultural differences between the two clusters of societies. Chapter 3 outlines the very different trajectories the social welfare systems in the two clusters have taken in modern history. Finally, Chapters 4–6 tell the history of the penal systems in both clusters, from the early modern period and up to the present day.
Like imprisonment rates, the quality of prison conditions is of course an empirical question. When compared with the original articles, the argument in the book is more specific. The differences in prison conditions between the two clusters is operationalized by the authors as follows: (1) Nordic prisons tend to be smaller; (2) officer/inmate relations are more desirable and egalitarian; (3) the quality of prison life is better (for instance, the quality of the food provided, the hygienic conditions, the amount of personal space and the quality of visiting arrangements are all superior in the Nordic prisons); (4) prison officers are better trained; and (5) prisoners in the Nordic countries are more likely to be involved in education or vocational training programmes that are more often directed at preparing them for life after release.
Viewed from the Norwegian perspective, one immediately has to agree that at least three out of the five criteria are convincing. Norwegian prisons are indeed small (even though some of the smallest have been closed or will be in the near future), the quality of life is comparatively good (prisons are relatively clean, tidy and safe) and the level of training prison officers are required to undergo is impressive compared with training regimes in other jurisdictions. The two remaining aspects—officer/inmate relations and the quality of education and vocational training programmes—may very well also favour Nordic prisons, although I would argue that more systematic comparative analysis is needed before we can make such a conclusion.
However, the central argument put forward by Pratt and Eriksson that conditions in Nordic prisons are better in general than what prisons in the Anglophone world can offer, does convince. That being said, the authors often tend to downplay the differences that can be found between Nordic prisons. It is not possible in this review to go into too much detail, but it is important to note that many prisons in the Nordic countries are also fairly basic and austere places. This, of course, raises the question as to whether Nordic societies in general are in fact less punitive. In my view, any punitiveness scale needs to include more than how often prisons are used and the quality of life in these institutions. Advanced welfare states, like the Nordic countries, will often employ other, equally intrusive, but more indirect forms of social control—perhaps even more so than other societies. While the darker side of Nordic societies is barely a theme in Pratt’s original BJC articles, the book does go a long way to correct this. A low imprisonment society is not necessarily a low social control society, and some of the alternatives to a prison sentence in the Nordic countries have been particularly draconic. From recent history, we could include for instance the aggressive assimilation policies forced upon the indigenous Sami population in Norway, as well as the ‘treatment’ of vagrants in prison-like institutions for years at a time.
The authors’ ambitious generalizations give readers a sweeping historical sketch of the penal history of the two clusters of societies. The result is an accessible account that will probably be extremely useful for many readers. Yet, I cannot help but feel that the authors have been rather selective in their presentation of the ‘historical facts’, ending up with a focus on those that may strengthen their argument. Comparisons across cultures are inevitably reductionist. The fact that many other legitimate and equally true stories could have been presented about the comparisons between these six countries and their penal systems, is not a problem in itself. But where are the counter examples? Where are the stories detailing the similarities and continuities between the two clusters of societies, rather than the differences? To make my point, the novels by Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson are juxtaposed by the authors with the works of Charles Dickens. Would a different set of authors have produced a different analysis? Similarly, in their analysis, Pratt and Eriksson discuss the lack of privately owned cinemas in Norway in 1937. I am left wondering what this really has to do with present-day prison conditions. What is the empirical relevance of this? I would argue that Pratt and Eriksson could have chosen a different set of novels, newspaper articles and pictures of more run-down prison wings, and turned it into a different story. Thus, one might go so far as to say that the book is not a systematic study of prison regimes in different countries at all; rather, it is a selective comparative cultural history. In places, the argument feels somewhat random, disjointed and conveniently linear. In general, however, while I do accept the principal argument, I am not confident that all Nordic prison historians would agree. It seems to me that Contrasts in Punishment is one of those books that may well divide penal scholarship.