The Preventive Turn: The Case of Sweden

• In Event: Protection and Prevention in the Governance of Crime: Historical Perspectives from Sweden and Britain

Abstract

In a social science like criminology concepts and conceptualizations play an important role, and the international transference of concepts seem unavoidable when it comes to attempts of comparative analysis. However, a discussion on how transferable concepts actually are seem rather scarce and concepts are bought whole heartedly as cookie-cutters applicable at any kind of dough. The idea of a preventive turn seems to be such a concept. The turn is seen as comprised of an increased concern regarding crime and public fear of crime, paired with concern about a weakening of traditional bonds of social control. The turn is also said to signal a limited capacity of the penal system in reducing rising crime levels, turning instead to other means of prevention such as community policing and local crime prevention as means to achieve safety. Causing all of this is the fall of the rehabilitative ideal, and its replacement by a retributive rationale in which proportionality of sentencing and punitive measures have replaced the penal welfarism that was aversive to punitive sanctions. The purpose of this paper is to try out the concept of a preventive turn for actual size when it comes to Sweden. This will be done by means of applying a historical perspective on crime prevention in Sweden, and our hypotheses is that when the notion of a preventive turn is placed in a more extensive historical understanding, the concept will not seem all to plausible and fruitful when it comes to understanding the history of prevention in a Swedish context. Instead of understanding crime prevention, and thus also crime policy, by way of notions like “turn”, “wave”, and consequently focusing on historical “breaks”, we will argue that continuity might be a more plausible way of conceptualizing the trajectory of crime prevention in Sweden.

Authors

• Robert Anderson, Linnæus University

• Paula Wahlgren, Linnæus University