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III. CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION.
Prison System.
The Swedish prison system in its present form is the result of about
half a century’s persistent and thorough work of reformation.
The initiative to these reforms was taken by the Crown Prince of that
day, afterwards King Oscar I, through his well-known work: On
Punishments and Prisons, published in 1840. In this work he advocates the
Philadelphian system (that of separate confinement) as the most suitable
basis for the treatment of prisoners in general. The old or Auburn system
(life in common, but under the strictest silence) ought to be retained only
for hopeless cases of relapse and for prisoners "sentenced to a longer term
of imprisonment than experience has shown can be spent in isolation
without risk of injury to the health of the prisoner". This system should,
however, be "given up in the same degree that experience recommends a
more extended application of the separate ss’stem". The work of building
provincial prisons according to the separate confinement system was
immediately undertaken, and most of the läns of the Kingdom had prisons
of this kind when the prison law of 1857 was promulgated. Through this
law the separate confinement system was made obligatory for all sentenced
to penal servitude for a term of two years or less. Separate confinement
of prisoners under trial was completely realized.
The separate confinement system was very considerably extended through
the prison laws of July 29, 1892 and June 22, 1906. — These laws provide
that each prisoner sentenced to penal servitude shall, as far as possible,
be kept in separate confinement for the whole time, if this does not exceed
three years; but when the term is longer, for the first three years. A
prisoner condemned to imprisonment, shall (as a rule not more than two
years) be under solitary confinement for his whole term.
The prisons of the Kingdom — except for several jails in the towns and
hundreds — amount to forty, with more than 3 000 solitarycells in all; five
of these are central prisons, viz., Långholmen near Stockholm,Härianda near
Gothenburg, Malmö, Härnösand, and Växjö, intended partly for separate
confinement, partly for imprisonment in common, but the prisoners in the latter are
guarded at night each in his own cell. That at Växjö is the central prison
for women, the rest are for men. Of the remaining jails, the 14 larger ones
are called penal prisons, the others state jails, all intended only for solitary
confinement. For demented prisoners there are separate departments established
at the Härnösand central prison and at the state jail in Västervik. All these
prisons, except that at Långholmen, are also used for the retention of prisoners
undergoing their trial. The jails of the towns and hundreds are also under the
supervision of the state authorities. Of prisons in thiH class, that at Stockholm
contains about 280 cells.
At the beginning of 1914 the number of prisoners committed for trial for
crime was 261, those under penal servitude 1 487, among whom 58 were
sentenced for life and 469 for a specified period over 2 years, and 567 committed
to prison, including 363 serving their time in default of payment of fines. Of
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