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How Long is Life? Comparing the Processes of Release for Life-Imprisoned Offenders in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden

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Abstract

In Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, offenders sentenced to life can be released conditionally from prison. Once they have served a legally specified minimum term behind bars, a court decides whether they qualify for release. Through comparative legal research, interviews with criminal justice professionals, and a questionnaire administered to those involved in the decision-making process, this study compares and contrasts how the release process functions in these three countries. Particular attention is paid to the nature of decision makers, the criteria they use to grant or deny release, and the amount of discretion they have in the release decision. The findings suggest that the release process exemplifies the traditionally strong role that judges have played in penal decision making in Scandinavia. The amount of discretion appears to be strongest in Finland and weakest in Sweden, where judges have increasingly been challenged to balance retributive against reintegrative goals of punishment in the release decision.

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Notes

  1. The most recent cases discussing this matter were Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom (2013) 66069/09130/10 3896/10, Murray v. the Netherlands (2016) 10511/10, and Hutchinson v. the United Kingdom (2017) 57592/08. For a complete list of ECHR cases regarding life imprisonment, see the Website of the European Court of Human Rights and their life imprisonment factsheet available at http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Life_sentences_ENG.pdf.

  2. The term “lifer” is used for an individual sentenced to a life sentence.

  3. In the 1990 case, Thynne, Wilson, and Gunnell v. the United Kingdom (ECHR 25 Oct 1990), the ECHR found that life-imprisoned offenders shall be given the opportunity to have a court consider their continued detention at reasonable intervals throughout their imprisonment. Following this case, the Council of Europe recommended in 2003 that “if the decision-making authority decides not to grant conditional release [to any prisoner], it should set a date for reconsidering the question” (Rec 2003(22) (Ch. 4, §21). Furthermore, “the criteria that prisoners have to fulfill in order to be conditionally released should be clear and explicit. They should also be realistic in the sense that they should take into account the prisoners’ personalities and social and economic circumstances as well as the availability of resettlement programmes” (Council of Europe Rec 2003(22), Ch. 4, §18).

  4. More recent research on the Scandinavian penal state, however, has found that crime and punishment have become increasingly politicized and that, as a result, trust in penal decision makers has declined somewhat (for Sweden, see Demker et al. 2008).

  5. The DPP or Kriminalforsorgen is the centralized Danish prison and probation administration.

  6. Scholars who have written about the act, which gave the President pardoning power, have used the English term Parole Reform Act of 1931 (Lappi-Seppälä 2011).

  7. When I reviewed the Scandinavian literature, I found that the three countries used different terms to describe the authority to relieve someone from punishment. Novak (Novak 2016) provides concise definitions of the frequency with which these terms are used. He uses the term “clemency” as an umbrella term to describe such power and includes pardons and sentence commutations within it. For Novak, “pardon” refers to the full or conditional cancelation of a sentence, while “sentence commutation” is the replacement of an existing sentence with a lesser one (e.g., a life sentence with a definite time sentence). Due to these slight differences in meaning between the terms, I will continue to use the terms applied in their country-specific contexts in the remainder of this study.

  8. Hay (1975) was specifically speaking about mercy, but his argument applies very well to pardon and clemency.

  9. Van Zyl Smit (2010) distinguishes between “irreducible” and “reducible” life sentences, with the latter referring to life sentences that come with a prospect of release.

  10. See also Parole Board (2018) for more information on how lifer panels work in England and Wales.

  11. For more details on the similarities between the Scandinavian countries, see Bondeson (2017), Cavadino & Dignan (2006), Pratt (2008), Lappi-Seppälä & Tonry (2011), and Schartmueller 2015, Unpublished doctoral dissertation.

  12. The dissertation research based on this methodology has led to another publication that involves a comparison of the penal confinement of life-imprisoned offenders in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden (Schartmueller 2018).

  13. When assessing the effects of the judicial release process, readers might be curious about recidivism rates among lifers released through governmental as opposed to judicial processes. However, accounting for recidivism rates in this study would be problematic for several reasons. As lifers constitute a very small group of prisoners in all three countries, and only very few are released every year, a presentation of recidivism rates among them would not reveal larger trends. Second, lifers have only been released through the judicial process for about 10 to 15 years in all three countries, leaving a short time frame for a meaningful comparison with the governmental process. Finally, this study was aimed at assessing the judicial process through comparative legal research and the perceptions of criminal justice professionals working with lifers rather than through the interpretation of statistical data.

  14. In a 1990 case, Thynne, Wilson, and Gunnell v. The United Kingdom (ECHR 25 Oct 1990), the European Court of Human Rights held that life-imprisoned offenders shall be given the opportunity to have a court consider their continued detention at reasonable intervals throughout their imprisonment. On that note, the Council of Europe Rec 2003(22) (Ch. 4, §21) held that “if the decision-making authority decides not to grant conditional release, it should set a date for reconsidering the question. In any case, prisoners [including lifers] should be able to reapply to the decision-making authority as soon as their situation has changed to their advantage in a substantial manner.” The same recommendation also held that “the criteria that prisoners have to fulfill in order to be conditionally released should be clear and explicit. They should also be realistic in the sense that they should take into account the prisoners’ personalities and social and economic circumstances as well as the availability of resettlement programmes” (Council of Europe Rec 2003(22), Ch. 4, §18).

  15. Between 2001 and 2016, eight lifers were released conditionally from Danish prisons (Danish Prison and Probation Department 2017).

  16. Between 2007 and 2016, the Helsinki Court of Appeals granted conditional release in 73 lifer cases.

  17. Between 2007 and 2016, an average of ten life sentences annually were commuted to definite time sentences by the Örebro District Court (Swedish Prison and Probation Service 2017).

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  1. Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, California State University, Chico, Chico, CA, 95929-0455, USA

    Doris Schartmueller

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Schartmueller, D. How Long is Life? Comparing the Processes of Release for Life-Imprisoned Offenders in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Eur J Crim Policy Res 25, 391–408 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-018-9388-z

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