Prison Escapes Still No Crime
Escaping from prison is going to stay legal in Sweden, despite calls for it to be made a crime following a series of spectacular break-outs in 2004.
The press and the public demanded to know what went wrong after violent criminals were able to get out of prison, two of them in the same week, and at the time the then opposition Liberals, Christian Democrats and the Center Party wanted the law to be changed.
But now Justice Minister Beatrice Ask says that rather than criminalising escaping and having to take offenders though the courts again, the former government’s solution of increasing an escapee’s sentence by up to six months as a prison disciplinary measure outside the court system is enough.
