All the Comforts

In Sweden's welfare state, even prisons have most of the comforts of home. Capital punishment went out 50 years ago, and murderers can count on going free in ten or twelve years. Last week the Swedish government removed one more invidious distinction between being inside and outside prison. The Royal Prison Board decreed that hereafter, Saturday as well as Sunday will be a rest day. Prisoners can spend the time sleeping late, getting a haircut, or sprucing up their rooms.

A lawbreaker, even a murderer, need spend as little as three months in a prison with bars. Even there, the rooms have built-in radios and telephones, and the calendar is filled with concerts, games, movies and social hours. After his initiation in a conventional prison, the prisoner can be sent to any one of 43 "open" prisons, where only the front door is "symbolically" locked at night. At these cozy retreats, some of them former manor houses, the ten to 50 inmates have a common room with TV, may receive visitors once a week, even entertain in their rooms.

Swedes wryly joke that hardened Finnish criminals have been moving across the border, finding that crime pays better in Sweden. One group of hobby-loving prisoners put together a radio transmitter, and were stopped only when Stockholm police reported hearing dirty ditties being broadcast on the wrong wave length--their own. Another prisoner was held to have carried visitors' day liberties too far. Giving the prison's street address, he had advertised for cuties whom he photographed in the nude for "art" pictures to sell to fellow inmates.

Sweden's penal reform has had no visible effect in reducing crime. Quite the opposite. Whereas the Royal Prison Board in 1944 predicted there would never be more than 2,300 prisoners at a time, today there are 5,268, with 13,000 more on parole or given suspended sentences because prison space is at a premium, even with considerable doubling up. Even so, the board stoutly insists that this is not the fault of lax punishment but the inevitable result of wartime relaxation of morality, slacker liquor laws, etc. Sweden's reported crime rate of 0.297% is still among the world's lowest (comparable U.S. rate: 0.896%).

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