The politics of pretrial detention: Mapping the development of Swedish remand policy

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, Sweden has received severe criticism from international human rights monitoring bodies for their pretrial detention regimes. Contrary to its acknowledged humane prison conditions, the majority of individuals held on remand are confined in conditions that resemble solitary confinement. While all Nordic countries have received similar criticism, Sweden has been argued to have done the least to change their remand practices. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the development and political processes that has shaped Swedish remand policy since the establishment of the 1948 Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure and the 1958 Act on Detention. The article shows that despite political concerns of the harms and infringements that the remand practices entail, the outcomes of reforms have been limited: due to administrative burdens, legal constraints, and increased punitive demands. The article elucidates the actors and conflicting agendas involved in shaping remand policy—of penal, political, humanitarian, administrative and legal nature—that are unattainable in structural analyses, and have application beyond the Swedish context and future in-depth examinations of developments in remand policy.