In response to the escalating and brutal displays of gang crime in Sweden, the government is contemplating a constitutional amendment aimed at limiting public access to information on specific criminal proceedings. Concurrently, prisons are experiencing a surge in overcrowding, with prison guards beginning to lose control entirely.

Union leaders have warned that Swedish prison officers have lost control of the country’s prisons, with overcrowding leading to a spike in threats and violence.

„We are losing control. The inmates more or less have taken over the prisons,”

– said Christer Hallqvist, chairman of the Seko union’s Department of Correctional Services, according to the RMX News site. He revealed that staff had no choice but to distance themselves from the prisoners, as they do not currently have the resources to “avert incidents,” and warned that the current situation will “end in disaster.” We have crossed the line, he said.

The Swedish government made a crackdown on crime one of its key electoral pledges and has sought to tackle head-on the ongoing crisis of gang violence affecting the country.

Rampant gang crime has been met by Sweden’s center-right administration, led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, introducing greater powers for police and harsher punishments for firearms offenses. However, the added focus on crime has not run parallel to sufficient investment in the country’s prisons, and overcrowding has become a major problem — something that even leading government officials have recognised.

“It is a very strained situation in Swedish penitentiary care,” said Minister of Justice Gunnar Strommer, admitting that it’s a result of the increasing crime rate over many years and the fact that the expansion of the Correctional Service started far too late.

“Now, we are taking all the measures we can in order to achieve an expansion in the long term and in the short term to give the Correctional Service the conditions to handle the pressure you are experiencing here and now,” he added.

According to the Correctional Service’s own data, threats and violence in prisons are now the highest they have been in recent times, with 1,333 cases of violence between inmates recorded last year, up from 1,198 in 2022 and 1,242 in 2021.

Alarmingly, 2,354 cases of threats and violence toward prison staff were recorded last year, up from 1,962 and 1,744 cases in the two previous years.

The threats call for constitutional amendment

As V4NA has highlighted in an earlier piece, Sweden has never seen such a huge surge in gang crime, with the number of explosions and shootings breaking new records last year.

In 2022, a record 60 fatal shootings were recorded across the country, and 50 people were killed in shootings by early December 2023. In addition, 140 bomb attacks took place, a steep rise compared to the 90 blasts recorded the previous year.

The Swedish police estimate that around 30,000 people across the country are directly involved in gang crime, including 9,000 active members and 21,000 individuals with links to them. Many of these individuals are minors who are increasingly recruited by criminal gangs to commit serious crimes.

For some time now, migrant criminal gangs have switched to targeting their rivals’ relatives, who are in no way involved in criminal gangs or crime, the Swedish Samnytt news portal reports. Gang-related, publicly accessible investigations and legal documents are reportedly used by gangs to map the circle of relatives and acquaintances of potential victims they pick as targets.

Last autumn, the media widely covered an incident when a 58-year-old woman was shot dead in her home in Uppsala. The woman was the mother of a gang member called Ismail Abdo. The murder was part of a conflict within the criminal network Foxtrot, between Abdo and the gang’s leader Rawa Majid, the Kurdish Fox, who now controls the organization in exile abroad.

The prosecutor will file charges in the case on Thursday. This means that the preliminary investigation by the police becomes public and anyone can request the court to be allowed to read it.

Police have warned that persons in the investigation report risk being added to a death list as the gang war will continue with mutual acts of revenge,

the Samnytt writes.

Following warnings from the police, Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer has said that the constitutional principle of public access to information may need to be restricted because of migrant criminal gangs. Public investigations into gang crime could also become classified in the future if the constitution is amended as indicated by the government. In the justice minister’s view, some progress would be made by extending the opportunity of anonymous witness testimony, which the government intends to introduce.

However, if the constitution is amended, not only can some of the information in preliminary investigations become secret – this is already the case today, and has been for a long time – but also activities and investigative processes. Strommer says he is aware that imposing such restrictions raises concerns, but migrant crime has escalated to the point where it has become necessary, at least temporarily, until the gangs are „crushed”.

The criminal networks exploit our openness in such a cynical way, with such brutal consequences for individuals, that it would be irresponsible of us not to consider making changes. However, it is clear that protecting openness and transparency is in our interest in the long term,”

the minister said.