Prisoners of process: The development of remand prisoner rates in the Nordic countries was published last year in the Nordic Journal of Criminology and has just won the NJC Best Article Prize 2023. The prize recognises excellent research and scholarship that engages with current and emerging issues in Nordic criminology.

Lönnqvist was interviewed by the Nordic Journal of Criminology earlier this week:

"Congratulations, Emelí! You have just won a prize for a research article published in NJC. You have written about imprisonment of persons suspected of crime. What is this article about and what made you write this particular text?"

- Thank you so much – I was immensely happy to learn that my article received this award! The article explores how the remand prison populations in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have developed over time until 2020. It also explores how the developments of these rates have been affected by the number of individuals imprisoned on remand and the length of detention, and how they have developed in relation to prison sentencing. 

- The article is the first in my dissertation, in which I study the Swedish remand institution from a sociological and historical perspective. I actually had not planned on writing this article when I started my PhD – I was convinced that someone else had done it. But as I was looking to contextualize how the use of remand had developed in Sweden compared to the other Nordic countries, I couldn’t find any articles that specifically looked into this – and it felt like an urgent empirical gap to fill before continuing my research. I am so happy that the article’s empirical contribution is recognized by the NSfK and NJC in this way – it truly shows that pre-trial practices are current and emergent issues that deserve further attention in Nordic criminological scholarship, read full article here and learn more about NJC.