EU Currents: Sweden’s Youth In Crisis
thom masat
An Emerging Problem
Sweden has long been renowned for being one of the safest nations in the European Union, if not the entire world. However, crime in the nation has been steadily rising, particularly gang-related crime.
Gang-related crime has thrived partly due to Sweden’s established age of criminal responsibility, which stands at 15 years old. Gangs frequently recruit children younger than 15 to carry out crimes because they would not face prison time.
Last January, the government proposed lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 13 years old. This is in response to organized crime syndicates reaching young Swedes through social media and luring them to commit crimes.
On January 26, it was announced that the bill would indeed move forward, with an eye toward full implementation on July 3rd of this year.
Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer quickly clarified that the plan would only be focused on the most serious of offenses, such as murder, bombings or sexual assault. However, this proposed legislation is facing logistical roadblocks, along with inspiring polarizing opinion and spirited debate.
A Question Of Resources And Morality
Concerns with overcrowding and a lack of resources within Sweden’s prison infrastructure are one of the first main issues that would need to be resolved. The recent spate of gang crime has caused Sweden’s prison population to swell. Between 2015 and 2025, the number of people incarcerated within Sweden increased by 91%. The occupancy rate of the average prison rose to 131% in 2024, a stark difference from an already high 92% occupancy rate in 2018.
As recently as last year, Sweden explored the options of sending their prisoners to other nations, with Norway, Belgium, Estonia, and Denmark offering up space within their facilities. Of those four nations, Estonia has established a plan to house Swedish prisoners, tentatively planning to give Stockholm 600 spots within Estonian jails.
If the agreement is ratified by the governments of both Estonia and Sweden, the scheme could be up and running by this summer.
Along with the concerns of overcrowding in Swedish correctional institutions, many are lamenting the ever-shrinking appetite for rehabilitation in the Swedish justice system.
Olle Jonasson is a Stockholm-based pastor who devotes his time to working with children who have run afoul of the law, many of them as young as 15.
Jonasson says that the children he works with, “have no criminal identity” and are victimized by faceless individuals pulling strings from outside of Sweden. He goes on to state that “I am not saying they should go without consequences, they have done these serious crimes, so they must have treatment.”
Emelí Lönnqvist, a researcher of crime policy at Stockholm University, has also taken notice of the shift that the Swedish government has taken in recent years in response to rising crime.
Lönnqvist said that prior policies of rehabilitation have gone by the wayside, and authorities are increasingly more interested in punitive punishment and “locking people up”, a behavior she attributed to the coalition of the more conservative parties within Sweden being supported by the more liberal Social Democrats.
She went on to state that Sweden’s approach is mirroring the strategy of mass incarceration, akin to what has been historically seen in the United States. She believes that continuing in this vein will “make things worse”.
The shift in policy has even attracted the attention of the United Nations. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child encouraged Sweden to keep the existing age of criminal responsibility at 15, citing that a shift below this threshold would run afoul of current child protection standards.
The “Acute Situation”
Despite arguments against the policy and the constrained resources, government officials are still confident that this approach will curb the uptick in juvenile crime while still providing avenues for rehabilitation.
In response to the UNCRC, Minister Strömmer doubled down on the importance of the issue, saying in part: “We are facing an acute situation, and the measures we take must reflect the seriousness of it.”
He further acknowledged the balancing act of prosecuting crimes and rehabilitation of offenders by stating that the government must “…do several things in parallel: we must protect people in our society from life-threatening violence, provide better redress for victims of crime, and at the same time care for and rehabilitate these children far better than we do today.”
With the planned implementation timeline fast approaching, Sweden will soon see how this concept will manifest in real time. Will the government be able to dissuade younger Swedes from entering a life of crime with stiffer penalties, or will pushing these vulnerable children into the correctional system end up keeping them attached to the vicious cycle of reoffending as they grow older?
