Prison Law

About the group

The Prison Law research group conducts interdisciplinary research on the prison and the remand prison as legal, social and human institutions. The research concerns the rules that govern prisons and remand prisons, how those rules are applied in practice and what consequences they have for prisoners, for staff and for society. The group brings together legal science with criminology, psychology, social work, political science, sociology, education, medicine and nursing science. Research is carried out in sub-projects with their own research questions and methods, led by researchers from the different disciplines.

The name of the group indicates its common point of departure. Prison law here denotes the entire chain of norms from the Prison Act and the Detention Act, with their associated ordinances, through the regulations and general guidelines of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, to the local rules of conduct adopted by each prison, together with the question of how these rules are applied in daily practice. The rules, however, are only one side of the matter. What a rule on segregation, prison leave, placement or schooling means for the person who is imprisoned, how it is put into practice by staff, and what consequences it has for health, reoffending, family ties and public confidence in the prison system are questions that legal science cannot answer on its own. Conversely, social science and medical research on prisons, which is extensive in Sweden and the Nordic countries, often lacks the connection to the rules that govern the institutions. The group brings these perspectives together around the same questions.

One example is the isolation of remand prisoners. That remand prisoners are isolated despite the statutory requirement that restrictions be used only in exceptional cases has been pointed out by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture since the early 1990s and confirmed by the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman. What the rules require is a legal question. What isolation looks like in practice and what harm it causes are criminological, psychological and medical questions. Why three decades of criticism have had limited effect is a question for political science and the sociology of law, and how remand prison staff perceive and use their discretion is a question for social work and sociology. Only when the answers are put together is it possible to say something about how isolation can be reduced. The same applies to the group’s other research areas.

The field is changing rapidly, and the changes raise questions for several disciplines at once. Since 1 July 2026, children and young people who have committed serious offences are sentenced to imprisonment instead of secure youth care and placed in special units for children and young people within the Prison and Probation Service, and since 10 September 2026 a time-limited lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to 14 applies to serious offences. The reform is a question of children’s rights and of the adaptation of the Prison Act to children, but equally a question of schooling, mental health, contact with the family and what happens to the children after release. On 3 July 2026 the Act on Temporary Enforcement of Swedish Prison Sentences Abroad entered into force, and in August of the same year the first prisoners were transferred to the prison in Tartu under the agreement between Sweden and Estonia. Here, questions about the transfer of Swedish public authority abroad meet questions about prisoners’ rights and about what distance from family and probation services means for the enforcement of the sentence and for reintegration. At the same time, the Prison and Probation Service is expanding on a large scale, occupancy has been very high for several years and a review of the Detention Act and the Prison Act is under way, with consequences for both the daily lives of prisoners and the working environment of staff.

The group is part of Örebro University’s profile area Crises and Transformation and relates to two of its focus areas, War and crisis and Violence, crime and equality. Since 2022 the Prison and Probation Service has been a designated emergency preparedness authority within the preparedness sector for public order and security, and the question of how prisons and remand prisons are to function during disruptions in the supply of energy, water and food, during evacuation and in a state of heightened alert is one of the group’s research areas. Here legal science is combined with political science research on crisis management, with disaster medicine and with the collaboration within Campus Total Defence.

The group’s first project concerns the Prison and Probation Service in Sweden and abroad, with the agreement between Sweden and Estonia as its point of departure. The research is conducted both as academic research leading to publications and as practice-oriented research in collaboration with the Prison and Probation Service, the supervisory bodies and other actors, for example through interview, survey and case-file studies. The group collaborates with Nordic and European research environments in the field and welcomes researchers and doctoral students from all disciplines with an interest in the prison as an institution.