Sweden banks on prisons to tackle gang crime

Sweden is looking to tougher prison terms to crack down on its gang crime problem.

A plan unveiled on Wednesday calls for criminals linked to gangs to have their prison sentences doubled.

The shake-up will also see judges told to show less sympathy for a convict’s personal circumstances.

The tougher stance meets pledges by Sweden’s ruling parties to take on the criminal underworld.

Swedish police have reported hundreds of shootings and explosions per year in what Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has called Europe’s worst wave of such violence.

Mr Kristersson promised an offensive against gangs after he took power last year, backed by the far-right Sweden Democrats, who came second in an election dominated by crime.

Figures show shootings have dropped by about a sixth, with 336 recorded in the past 12 months compared to 408 the previous year. However, party leaders say killings are still far more common than in other Nordic countries.

As many as 30,000 people may be involved with criminal gangs with three more recruited every day, leaders of the governing parties wrote in a joint article.

“The criminal networks' profits come from drug trafficking and extensive financial fraud. Criminal networks influence public decision-makers and infiltrate political parties. They silence witnesses and behave threateningly towards judges and prosecutors. Ultimately, democracy and the rule of law are endangered,” they said.

“Today's penalties do not meet the reality we live in. They do not provide society with sufficient protection against dangerous criminals and do not satisfy the victims' right to redress.”

The seven-point plan marks a “shift in focus from the perpetrator to the victim of crime”, said Sweden’s EU Affairs Minister Jessika Roswall.

Attorney General Petra Lundh has been tasked with overseeing the rethink of the criminal law. Critics say the focus on prisons neglects issues such as money laundering.

One of the proposals is that a string of violent crimes could come with a life sentence, even if none of the individual crimes would normally call for that level of punishment.

Double jail terms for offences “connected to criminal networks” could accompany a diktat that the upper end of the sentencing scale “must be used significantly more often”.

The proposals also include scrapping a credo that prison terms should be avoided if possible and that an offender’s circumstances should be factored into the sentence.

“Today, there is a presumption in Swedish legislation that states that the court should, as far as possible, avoid prison sentences and choose a lighter penalty,” said Susanna Silfverskiold, a pundit and government adviser.

“Criminals can also receive a lower sentence if, for example, they lose their job after the crime. Madness that [the governing parties] now intend to change.”