Overuse of Criminal Law in Finland

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.