Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK´s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
I can prove the lacking demand for new measures to prevent crime in Finland, a Finnish
peculiarity, by using figures made by Tapio Lappi-Seppälä for other purposes. He uses them
to prove that the increase of criminality in Finland is not a consequence of the crime policy
which has decreased the number of prisoners.
Figure 2
Criminality has increased almost identically in four Nordic countries as the left picture shows
(penal code offences; the level differences are mainly due to statistical systems). The picture
on the right side shows that Finland is an exception: in Denmark, Norway and Sweden the
number of prisoners has been almost constant, in Finland it has gone drastically down. Now,
my question is: In which kind of society that kind of decrease in prison numbers as we have
had in Finland is possible?
My answer is: It is possible only in a society where criminality is not a major political
question. Both the demand for harsh repressive measures and the possibilities to market the
alternative crime prevention are based on the public concern on crime problems. In Finland
crime issues have not been high on the political agenda. The Finns have lived too well with
the existing criminality. That is the reason why our council has remained so diminutive.
Time is changing. There are clear signs that the public concern on crime problems is
increasing. I’m not unreservedly happy.
The council was not planned to serve as a body with co-ordinating power in crime policy. The
reason, I think, is that in Finland we traditionally don’t have an illusion of unrealistic
consensus in criminal policy issues. Conflicting views on crime problems have been relatively
open in our country, partly because the police belongs not to the Ministry of Justice, but the
Ministry of Interior. At the same time there is a strong need for a forum for co-operation in
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