On Tuesday, the Swedish government announced plans to strengthen criminal penalties before the September election. The legislation aims to encourage courts to assign harsher sentences and to impose longer durations on repeat offenders.
Sweden has grappled with a gang crime wave for the past two decades and, although shootings have come down significantly in the last four years, crime is still one of the most important issues for voters.
The Nordic nation has had a longstanding tradition of not adding up all the separate offences for a person convicted of several crimes, instead basing the sentence on the most serious crime.
“That means that the fourth or fifth fraud and so on has, in practice, been free from punishment,” Minister of Justice Gunnar Strommer revealed at a press conference, stating that, under the new proposal, all committed crimes would be taken into consideration.
“Our expectation is that this change will mean significantly longer sentences for serial offenders,” Strommer said.
The government also said courts would no longer take mitigating circumstances, such as loss of employment, into consideration to the same extent when handing down sentences.
