This book developed almost by accident, with some lucky breaks and happy coincidences along the way, rather than being the product of some carefully worked out plan that was then rewarded with a generous research budget. It grew from an opportunity that occurred towards the end of 2003, when my employers, Victoria University of Wellington, announced that there was money available for seeding research – but with the caveat that it had to be spent by the end of the year, otherwise it would be lost. At that time, New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition government had copied Tony Blair’s utterly specious promise to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. The inevitable consequences were a dramatically increasing prison population and, thus, overcrowded prisons, amidst a frenetic and usually uninformed public discourse on law and order. It was at this point that the idea suddenly came to me – although I then had very little idea of what it would actually involve – that I would like to do research on low imprisonment societies: how had they managed to avoid the fiasco that was taking place in New Zealand and similar Anglophone societies? Accordingly, I put in what proved to be a successful bid for some of the funding. This then allowed me, at very short notice, to undertake a European tour that lasted one month, during the course of which I visited a number of countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (although not Iceland, which simply seemed too remote and too much of a ‘special case’ because of its population size). I spent a few days in each country, visiting one or two prisons in each and having discussions with academics and civil servants.
Nils Christie, at the Institute of Criminology, University of Oslo, whom I already knew, arranged my trip to Norway, and also provided me with contact people in the other Nordic countries, particularly Henrik Tham at the Department of Criminology, University of Stockholm, and Tapio Lappi-Seppälä at the National Research Institute of Legal Policy in Helsinki. It was the interest and encouragement of these three gentlemen, in particular, that made it possible for the Nordic research to develop as it did. I also recognized early on that, to maximise the value of any research that I undertook, it was going to be important to look at clusters of societies: this would have much more sociological impact and validity than a study of one small modern society (as most of those with low imprisonment rates seem to be). In these respects, the Nordic countries were the most obvious choice. Furthermore, there were no immediate language difficulties since just about everybody spoke excellent English in these countries.
In addition, through Henrik Tham and Jukka Kekkonen (another pivotal Nordic figure for me) in the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, I was offered Teaching Fellowships for 2006 that included free accommodation and an honorarium. This would mean that fieldwork in Sweden and Finland would mainly be self-financing. It was also clear, though, that I would need institutional support in each host country, in terms of having a community of interested others to whom I could turn for guidance, introductions, etc. At that time, criminology at the University of Copenhagen was in the process of reorganization; in contrast, there was a lively research community at the Institute of Criminology in Oslo (a member had also asked me on arrival, ‘Why have you come here? Nothing ever happens here’, which, after all the law and order ‘noise’ in New Zealand, was exactly what I wanted to hear). Hence, the selections of Norway (a visit funded by my university’s research and study leave allowance and a travel grant from the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology), Finland and Sweden for the Nordic research. Most regrettably, I had to decline the offer of a subsequent Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, which Flemming Balvig was able to secure for me, after I decided – thankfully – that that the study of three low imprisonment societies was sufficient for the purposes of this research.
A two-part article, based on this research, appeared in the British Journal of Criminology in 2008 (the editor, Pat Carlen, had very helpfully suggested that I split my otherwise too lengthy manuscript in this way before submission). These papers concentrated mainly on post-1940s Nordic developments, because this was the period for which English documentation was mostly available. The Anglophone countries, in effect, were silent comparators at this point. Thereafter, I had an important decision to make. Instead of signing off at this juncture, I chose to take the research further and to turn it into a more specific explanation of the penal contrasts between the Nordic and Anglophone societies. More fieldwork in the former was undertaken in 2008–2009 with the assistance of two more Teaching Fellowships, another Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology travel grant and funding from Victoria University. More significantly, however, it was imperative that I now started to mine previously untranslated Nordic documentation to advance the analysis. Fortunately, this did not then depend on my own attempts to learn Swedish since, in 2008, I serendipitously met the joint author of this book, Dr Anna Eriksson, based at Monash University, at a conference in Perth, Western Australia, and I was able to recruit her to the project. Swedish herself, and fluent in Norwegian and Danish as well, she was, amongst other things, able to take charge of the vast majority of the Nordic translations and provide guidance on Nordic society as a whole, as the comparative project that the research had now become began to take shape. Without this contribution from her, it would simply have been impossible for this book to have been written.
At much the same time that Anna began work with me, in 2009 I was awarded a Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ) James Cook Research Fellowship in Social Science (with thanks to John Morrow and Pat Carlen for their letters of support). This took me out of university teaching and administration and allowed me to concentrate specifically on this research, as well as providing some limited funding for the Anglophone fieldwork: the logic for the three societies that were selected for this purpose – England, New Zealand and Australia – is explained in the Introduction. More good fortune then followed: I was invited to take up a Fellowship at the Straus Institute for Advanced Studies of Law and Justice at New York University for the 2010–2011 academic year. In the company of eight other ‘Punishment Fellows’, a group convened by David Garland who also chaired the workshop sessions that we had, this proved to be a providential experience. I am very grateful to the RSNZ for temporarily suspending the Cook Fellowship so that I could spend the year there, and for then allowing it to resume. This meant that from July 2009 to June 2012, when the manuscript was completed, I lived continuously, if not always harmoniously, with this project.
The book builds on and embellishes ideas and materials set out in my 2008 British Journal of Criminology articles, ‘Scandinavian exceptionalism in an era of penal excess, parts I and II’; ‘Penal excess and penal exceptionalism: Welfare and imprisonment in Anglophone and Scandinavian societies’, in Adam Crawford (2011) (ed.), International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance, Cambridge University Press; and, with Anna Eriksson, ‘Scandinavian exceptionalism in penal policy’, in the Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab (2009); ‘Mr Larsson is walking out again: The origins and development of Scandinavian prison policy’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (2010); ‘In defence of Scandinavian exceptionalism’, in Jane Dullum and Thomas Ugelvik’s (2011) Penal Exceptionalism?, Routledge; and ‘Penal policy and the social democratic image of Society’, in Kerry Carrington, et al. (eds) (2012) Crime Justice and Social Democracy, Palgrave Macmillan.
I would like to thank everyone who took the time to have discussions about penal policy in their country with me as the fieldwork was undertaken; similarly, all the prison staff and inmates at the penal institutions that were visited for their helpfulness; and Lars Krantz for facilitating these visits in Sweden; similarly, Jonas Uchermann in Norway, Esa Vesterbacka and Jarmo Littunen in Finland; the New Zealand Department of Corrections; Luke Grant in New South Wales; and in England, Alison Liebling who introduced me to Alan Scott and Eileen Fenerty-Lyons at North West Prisons, and they then very kindly arranged visits for me. I am also grateful to Magnus Hörnqvist, Hanns von Hofer, Roddy Nilsson, Yngve Hammerlin, David Brown, Mark Finnane, Paul Morris, Ragnar Kristoffersen, Allan Brodie, Wayne Morrison, Melanie Nolan, Philip Stenning, Russell Smandych, and Karen Harrison for their advice, assistance and encouragement as the project took shape. I would particularly like to thank Nicola Lacey, who read an early version of the whole manuscript and provided very helpful directions and suggestions, as well as David Green, Thomas Ugelvik, Per-Åke Nylander, David Riley and Charles Sedgwick, who read and commented on individual chapters. I would also like to thank Thomas Ugelvik and Jane Dullum for organizing conferences at the University of Oslo in 2009 and 2010 that allowed me to present the ideas behind the British Journal of Criminology articles to Nordic audiences. Thanks are also due to Thomas Sutton and Nicola Hartley at Routledge for their support and encouragement. A succession of Victoria University of Wellington research grants allowed me to hire as research assistants/translators Carin Lennesiö, Kimberley Gustavsson and Leonard Swahn in Sweden, and Line Marie Sørsdal, Linda Gulli and Silje Finstad in Norway. Ilse Lehtimaja translated a large amount of Finnish language documentation. In addition, I was able to hire Craig Carpenter and Swati Bhim in Wellington. Anne Holland worked for me throughout this period and also formatted the manuscript, prepared the tables and figures and collated the bibliography. Thanks are due to my daughter Isabella and dog Suzie for being themselves. I am greatly indebted to Anna Chang for her tolerance, forbearance and encouragement. The end product, of course, remains the responsibility ofmyself and Anna Eriksson.
John Pratt
Institute of Criminology
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
June 2012