Swedish Criminal Justice History 1830-1930

Sweden and the other Nordic countries are well known today for having comparatively low rates of incarceration.

But scholarship on the origins of “Nordic exceptionalism” has been limited by poor availability of criminal justice data prior to WW2. In this project we will digitize and analyze pre-WW2 Swedish prison records.

In doing so we hope to better understand how and why Sweden went from having relatively high incarceration rates in the mid 19th century, to exceptionally low incarceration rates in the mid 20th century.

We will generate, analyse, and make available to the public a unique database on incarceration at the national, regional, municipal, and even the individual level.

Sweden has historically gathered detailed individual prisoner records, which include information on the family background, occupation, and personal property of everyone entering prison from the 1830s on. All prisoners were additionally photographed on entry, starting in the 1880s.

In addition to collecting aggregate national and local data on arrests and incarceration, we will digitize a complete set of individual records from Landskrona prison 1830-1920.

We intend to link the individuals in these records to an existing longitudinal demographic database for the town and its environs.

Linked data will provide us and other scholars with a unique opportunity to study the effects of incarceration on not only the prisoners themselves, but also their families and descendants.