How did Swedish prisons turn into "five-star hotels"?

[Love Pulse]

While some countries seek to build new prisons due to the increase in the number of prisoners, there are other countries that closed their prisons and turned them into museums and hotels for hiking, and this is the case of some Scandinavian countries that import prisoners to their empty prisons.

 

The Scandinavian countries are located in northern Europe and are "Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Denmark", and this name has been taken from the names of the countries it covers.

 

"We have noticed an unusual or unprecedented decline in the number of prisoners, and now we have the opportunity to close a number of our facilities due to our lack of need at this time, and we hope that our efforts have paid off for rehabilitation and crime prevention," says Nils Uberg, head of the Swedish Prison and Rehabilitation Authority. .

 

The director general of criminals' reform prisons, Niels O'Briy, proposed that short-term prison sentences be replaced with more correctional penalties, such as electronic surveillance and tracking, deepening dialogue and increased cooperation with the courts, because it would bring greater benefit to the prison reform.

 

This came in a translated report on a meeting with the Swedish newspaper "Dagens Nyheter", where Aubrey said that 70% of all prison sentences today are less than six months, adding, "It is unfortunate that criminal policy discussions often revolve around making the term of a sentence Prison is longer. "

 

In 2013, Sweden closed 4 prisons after the decrease in the number of prisoners and the decrease in the level of crime. According to the statistics of the International Center for Prison Studies, the number of people sentenced to prison is 67 out of every 100,000 people.

 

The number of prisoners in Sweden began to decrease since 2004, when the number of prisoners amounted to 5772 prisoners, as the number of those convicted of theft, drug crimes and violence decreased by 36%, 25% and 12%, respectively, and the number of prisoners decreased to 4,852 prisoners, out of the 9.5 million inhabitants This is the Scandinavian kingdom.

 

The Egyptian traveler Ahmed Hajjajovic, who had an experience in Swedish prisons, transmitted it via social media, and published pictures of him inside the Swedish "Angelholms" prison, which turned into a hotel where the price of renting the room reaches 1100 Egyptian pounds per day.

 

Hajajovic wrote about his experience saying, "Sweden has closed 4 prisons so that there are not enough prisoners to fill the prisons !! ... The Swedish government has turned the largest prison in Sweden to a luxury hotel and museum and also has more than 100 thousand inmates and more than a million visitors per year other than international conferences, meetings and parties that It hosts the hotel garden (formerly prison).

 

Swedish prisons apply a system of rehabilitation and reform, and its laws prohibit executions whatever the crime, and the maximum penalty for them is 21 years, and allows those who spend less than 5 years the freedom to stay in their homes and come in the morning to prison, and students go to university and return to their prison, which is required to be built on a lake Or a swimming pool, according to Hagagovich.

 

According to the 2014 Statistics of the National Crime Prevention Center in Sweden, violent murders amounted to 87 cases. It is the same number recorded in 2013, and during the past ten years, cases of violent crime leading to murder ranged between 68-111 cases annually, and this means that there is a regression in the development of fatal violence.

This is how the prisons in the Kingdom of Sweden currently, which was about 100 years ago, suffer economic and social conditions that forced thousands of its citizens to leave their cities and villages and migrate to America, but it managed to rise from the semi-slavery stage to the ranks of industrialized countries, with a social system in which crime rates fell and a system A leading role model.

 

Until the year 1700 BC, Sweden depended on bronze imports from Europe, and lived a primitive life in houses with a single wooden floor, according to historical references. After it was very poor, its star shone as a major European power in the seventeenth century.

 

Thanks to the success and continuity of the Kingdom of Sweden during that period, due to the great changes in the Swedish economy during the reign of King Gustav I in the middle of the sixteenth century, and published Protestant.

 

But the Swedish economy suffered a deterioration as a result of the wars that continued for up to half a century, coincided with a famine that struck the Swedish Empire, and claimed the lives of about 10% of the po[CENSORED]tion of Sweden, which made the task of Carl XI from 1655-1697, focused on rebuilding the economy and equipping the army.

 

With the po[CENSORED]tion doubling from 1750 to 1850, more than a million Swedes were forced to migrate from their country to America for fear of starvation and rebellion, and Sweden remained in extreme poverty, because it relied almost entirely on the agricultural economy, while Denmark and Western European countries began to manufacture .

 

The situation remained like this until significant changes occurred due to innovations and significant po[CENSORED]tion growth. These innovations included government-sponsored programs to prevent feudalism and attacks on agricultural land, and new crops such as potatoes were introduced.

 

In the period from 1870 to 1914 industrial developments occurred that brought Sweden to where it is now, as well as strong po[CENSORED]r movements emerged during the last half of the nineteenth century such as trade unions, anti-alcohol groups and independent religious groups, and the Swedish Social Democratic Party was founded in the year 1889, which accelerated From Sweden’s transition to democracy.

 

After World War II, Sweden opened to trade and turned to international competition in the manufacturing sector until the 1970s, but it experienced a period of economic decline. From 1970 to 1990, the general tax increased by more than 10%, and growth rates were low compared to most Other countries in Western Europe.

 

The Swedish economy lost more than half of the gross domestic product, which led to the decline of Sweden from the list of the five largest countries in terms of GDP per capita, and the government moved to cut spending in addition to many reforms aimed at improving the country's competitiveness, including limiting social welfare. And privatizing services and public goods.

 

But this was in the past, but now Sweden has become the leader of research centers as the best country, according to the Forbes report, in 2017 Sweden ranked first as the best country in the field of trade and business in the world.

 

The Forbes report indicated that 10 years ago Sweden was ranked 17th, but by adopting economic policies that have jumped to the top of the list, during the past two decades, they have limited restrictions and restraint in the field of budget and luxury, and today they are home to advanced industries and international brands.

 

The gross domestic product is $ 39.8 billion and the growth rate is 1.5%. As for the inflation rate, it is 0%, and unemployment reaches 6.9% until December 2016, according to official statistics.

 

The Swedish experience can be summarized by what the World Economic Forum website started talking about in an article published in February 2017: "If you are a Swedish citizen you should be proud of that", pointing to 9 factors that raised Sweden to advanced levels even compared to the rest of the world, it also occupies It ranks first in the world in the Economist Democracy Index and seventh in the United Nations Human Development Index.

 

"The experience of Scandinavia with the issue of prisons, and with the criminal world in general, is not difficult to deal with chemistry or difficult logarithms," journalist Abdel Nasser Salama said of that experience in a newspaper article for Al-Masry Al-Youm.

 

Salama saw that the solution is a story closely related to the world of education, and in the case of the third world also linked to the world of freedom, democracy, human rights and respect for the other opinion, he added, certainly, the situation in the third world countries is completely different and needs to deal with a map of intertwined form and content.

 

In his view, the solution to the prison issue relates to political will more than anything else, and is related to achieving justice and equality, economic recovery, and the elimination of unemployment, poverty, hunger, homelessness and slums.

 

Salama concluded his article by saying, "Since these are difficult matters at the current stage, let us start serious negotiations with Scandinavian countries, perhaps or some of them accept a new type of third world export, which is prisoners, in order to reduce the burdens, and if we will collide with queues who are outside prisons, they wish to spend The rest of their lives are there, in the five-star prisons. "