The Scandinavian Efforts to Balance Societal Response To Offenses and Offenders: Crime Prevention and Social Control

Abstract

Scandinavian countries, individually and collectively, have offered a progressive perspective on crime problems. Discontent with a treatment/punishment dichotomy current policy is one of prevention oriented rationality which focuses both on offenders and criminogenic social conditions. The system's response has moral and ethical implications for crime control, important in itself for crime prevention. The thrust is toward a criminal policy that relies on alternative responses external to the criminal justice system and that de-emphasizes the repressive nature of sanctions. Ask anyone, lay person or professional, where the most progressive, innovative, and humane criminal justice policy is and the answer will most likely be Scandinavia. There is a mystique about Scandinavia that pervades the academic and popular press regarding correctional methods and philosophies. For decades Scandinavian criminal justice policy has been a source of comparison, information, and direction. In 1966, Norvall Morris wrote an...