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Overuse of Criminal Law in Finland
- from PART III - NATIONAL REPORTS 3ÈME PARTIE. RAPPORTS NATIONAUX
- Edited by Piet Hein van Kempen, Manon Jendly
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- Book:
- Overuse in the Criminal Justice System
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 14 May 2019, pp 293-332
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Finland is a small Nordic country with a population of 5.4 million. The Finnish juridical system is manifestly rooted in western, continental legal culture with strong influence from neighbouring Nordic Countries. Today Finland profiles itself – together with the other Nordic countries Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – as a county with internationally high level of social security and equality, high levels of social trust and political legitimacy, and low levels of penal repression. However, this has not always been the case. During the last Century, Finland has experienced three wars (the 1918 Civil War and the two wars against Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944). These crises have left their marks in the Finnish society and its criminal policy. The trends in prison rates have been more turbulent than presumably in any other Westerns European country, leading to a gross overuse of imprisonment in connection with the societal crisis during the first half of the 1990s. At times imprisonment rates reached the levels of 250-300 / 100,000 inhabitants, five to six times higher than those in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Figure 1 displays trends in imprisonment rates in four Nordic countries in 1900-2014.
Three “imprisonment peaks” may be detected during the first half of the last century. In the aftermath of the civil war in 1918 and 1919, Finnish prisons were filled with political prisoners. During the prohibition period in the shift of the 1920/30s and followed by the recession in the 1930s, prohibition-related crime and property offences increased, resulting in severe overcrowding in the Finnish prisons. The third peak appeared in the aftermath of the Second World War, partly consisting of war-time offences, partly of the post war crime wave.
In the 1950s, a period of normalization, known as the “age of reconstruction”, began in Finland. The country was recovering from the damages of the two World Wars and the burden of paying war compensation to the Soviet Union, while at the same time establishing the industrial infrastructure which formed the foundations of the forthcoming welfare state. Finland was catching up with her Nordic neighbours that had survived the first half of the 20th century with significantly smaller damages.
Overuse of Imprisonment: Statistical Analyses of Incarceration Rates Across the World
- from PART II - THEMES 2ÈME PARTIE. THÈMES
- Edited by Piet Hein van Kempen, Manon Jendly
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- Book:
- Overuse in the Criminal Justice System
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 14 May 2019, pp 165-212
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
An unprecedented expansion of penal control has occurred in recent decades in different parts of the world. Since the mid-1970s, North American imprisonment rates have increased nearly fivefold. Many other countries followed from the 1980s onwards, in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and Oceania. This has resulted to high imprisonment rates and severe overcrowding. In 2016, more than two out of three countries have an occupancy rate of over 100%. In the worst cases, the number of prisoners exceeds the number of prison places by three to one.
This text gives an overview of major trends in the use of imprisonment across the world. Trends and differences in imprisonment rates are examined both cross-sectionally and over time.
Imprisonment rates. In the following, the use of imprisonment is examined mainly in terms of imprisonment rates / 100,000 population. Imprisonment rates indicate how many of its residents the state keeps in prison on any given day (Stock-statistics). The main data-source is the World Prison Brief database (WPB). The database is hosted by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR), at Birkbeck University of London. The WPB holds statistics for 223 independent countries and dependent territories. For most countries, there is also data on specific categories of prisoners, including juveniles, persons detained in pre-trial or prior to sentencing, female prisoners and foreigners. Other sources include the Council of Europe data from the SPACE I project. It allows more exact comparisons between European countries by providing standardized (adjusted) figures through the use of identical counting methods. The third source of information includes national time-series, dating back to the early 1960s or early 1980s.
Besides stock-based imprisonment rates, the use of imprisonment can also be measured by the number of people admitted to prison (flow-statistics), or by the length of served prison terms. Both measures provide complementary information about a country's prison profile. On the other hand, imprisonment rates (as stock-statistics) are a function of the number of entries and the duration of stay. It thus tells more than either of these two options alone and is the most complete basic indicator for the use of imprisonment.
Women in prison in Finland
- from Part III - National Reports: 3ÈME Partie Rapports Nationaux
- Edited by Piet Hein van Kempen, Maartje Krabbe
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- Book:
- Women in Prison
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 25 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 20 March 2017, pp 333-344
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
As in many domestic prison systems, in Finland the number of women in prison has been increasing over the last few decades. However, since these women still amount to a small percentage of the entire prison population, adequate facilities for them are scarce. This chapter presents an overview of the rules and policies relevant to women in prison in Finland.
INTERNATIONAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK
In May 1990, Finland ratified the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention had an immediate and direct impact on detention rules, as the maximum length of police detention fell overnight from 21 days to three days. But the ratification of the Convention had deeper consequences too. It impacted on doctrines of legal interpretation, developed in constitutional theory. The Convention does not have absolute precedence over other statutory law in Finland, but should there be a conflict between these norms, a doctrine of “human rights friendly interpretation”, as developed by the Constitutional Law Committee, provides that the interpretation and application of laws shall always aim at obtaining a result that, as closely as possible, corresponds to the international obligations of Finland in the field of human rights. The same principle has also been declared in the new Finnish Constitution, which entered into force in 2000. According to section 22, public authorities shall “guarantee the observance of basic and human rights”. This confirms on a constitutional level the Constitutional Law Committee's “human rights friendly interpretation” of national law. As a result, the Finnish courts have more and more often referred to the articles of the Convention in their decisions.
Section 7 of the Finnish Constitution states that
“No one shall be sentenced to death, tortured or otherwise treated in a manner violating human dignity.”
In addition:
“The rights of individuals deprived of their liberty shall be guaranteed by an Act.”
The latter provision means that deprivation of liberty must be based on an Act of Parliament (not on inferior norms).
STATISTICS ON WOMEN IN CRIME, IN DETENTION AND IN PRISON/CRIMINOLOGICAL FACTORS
Over the last 35 years, Finnish women have become more involved with the criminal justice System. They have committed more crimes, for which they have been convicted and detained, as Tables 1-5 show. However, the number of female prisoners is still rather low in Finland in comparison to the number of male prisoners, which causes problems.
Penal Policy and Sentencing Theory in Finland
- Tapio Lappi-Seppälä
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- Journal:
- Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence / Volume 5 / Issue 1 / January 1992
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 09 June 2015, pp. 95-120
- Print publication:
- January 1992
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The ideology of treatment, as well as confidence in the special preventive effects of punishment, was severely attacked in the late 1960’s. In Scandinavia, this criticism quickly led to a series of legislative reforms. The first target was the system of preventive detention. The lack of legal security was considered to be most obvious flaw here. After the reforms concerning the use of preventive measures—for example, for dangerous offenders—were implemented, attention shifted to the structure of the whole penal system. From the mid 70’s on, the Finnish criminal justice system was reformed in a “neo-classical” spirit. Instead of individualization and rehabilitation, the emphasis is now placed on legal security and the principles of proportionality, predictability, and equality. These ideas and principles received their most manifest expression in the 1976 reform of sentencing provisions (Chapter 6 in the Finnish penal code).