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Progressive Swedish prisons fail to discourage repeaters

* New York Times

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NORRKOPING, Sweden Swedes have among the most progressive and humane prison systems. The government has striven to keep prison populations low, to mete out short sentences, to provide a vast array of services and support facilities for inmates and to experiment with minimum security detention centers.

Despite these efforts the prison system has failed to make significant inroads in the rehabilitation of criminals, particularly among those with previous convictions, whose rate of recidivism is over 70% as anywhere in the world.

as high

The recidivism rate has touched off a far-ranging debate between those who advocate the abandonment of rehabilitation efforts and those who argue that even greater innovations should be carried out, perhaps to the point of abolishing imprisonment except for a few hundred violent criminals.

"Our philosophy of rehabilitation has been ship-wrecked," said Holger Romander, the chief prosecutor, in a statement given wide circulation last year. "Criminality will not be cured through prison

rehabilitation."

Among foreign criminologists, who have looked to Sweden as a laboratory for experimental prison reform, the failure of rehabilitation attempts here has undermined their efforts to press for more progressive criminal legislation at home.

"It is disheartening," said a visiting Western European prison expert. “In

my country we are still in the Middle Ages compared to the Swedish approach to criminals. Even in the best of times it is difficult to commit the government to more aid for prisoners. Now there is a growing cry. for law and order, and we cannot even point to the Swedes to support our case for a more liberal approach to criminals."

There are 3,300 inmates in Swedish prisons on any given day a low figure even for a country with only 3.2 million people. The median prison term is 100 days. All prisoners are given individual rooms that resemble university student quarters, cells being a term that is frowned upon.

Most prisoners serving less than a year are sent to open institutions, without walls or fences, where convicts may hold jobs in nearby communities during the day. At Tillberga Prison, about 75 miles west of Stockholm, inmates receive wages that are competitive with the labor market outside or can attend study courses. This open institution offers sauna baths, swimming, skiing and a golf driving range.

Even in prisons with more restrictive security measures and with buildings that resemble traditional institutions like the prison here in Norrkoping, about 90 miles southwest of Stockholm there are far more extensive educational, psychiatric and job-training facilities than in other countries. The closed prisons still provide for conjugal visits at least once a week and three-day-furloughs every other month for all but a few dozen high-risk inmates. Violence in prison is rare.

Homosexual rape is almost unheard

of. The guards, unarmed, would have to call the local police in the unlikely event of a riot.

A prison official at Norrkoping recounted a recent break-in by an armed group who freed a prisoner. "Once they got in," he said, "we could do nothing but stand by and watch the prisoner escape in a sports car. It was a good thing that the guards had no guns because it would simply have endangered their lives."

In part the permissiveness of the Swedish system is a reflection of the low rate of criminal violence. Only 12% of the 10,000 people who pass through the prisons every year are convicted of violent crimes, and murders number 20 to 30 a year.

The relative permissiveness of the

prison authorities also stems from a long-accepted belief with heavily. paternalistic and moralistic overtones

that convicts should be accorded humane treatment. Some of the changes of recent years would probably startle even the most fervent advocates of prison liberalization in Western Europe and the United States.

Why then the high rate recidivism?

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Among the dozens of inmates, former convicts, officials and critics interviewed, most agreed that Swedish society remained as resistant as any to the acceptance of those released.

"Most people still think of convicts as if we all walked around with masks over our faces and tattoes on our arms," said Lasse Bjormlund,

head of the Central Organization for Prisoners.

"Landlords won't rent us apartments. No matter what people say, ex-convicts find it extremely difficult to find jobs."

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Bjorklund is serving his eighth or ninth sentence he is not sure and does not feel that any kind of prison would have rehabilitated him. He has been convicted several times

for robbery; his current sentence stems from charges of fraud. At age 47, he says he will abandon crime "because I'm getting a bit too old for this."

An American inmate, serving a 31⁄2 year sentence for trafficking in narcotics, said he found rehabilitation programs in Swedish prison as ineffective as those in American ones, where he has also served time.