Flemming Balvig

When Law and Order Returned to Denmark

The international trend toward increased use of punishment has been visible in Denmark since the early 1990s and has accelerated in the first years of the new millennium. As in other countries the trend cannot be explained by changes in crime or a political turn to the right. The increased use of punishment in (post) modern societies undoubtedly has a very complex background. The primary explanation put forth in this article is that it is based on a radical change in the human conditions and in the way people relate to their world. It is an existential revolution and, as such, it has emerged ‘from the bottom’ of society. This suggestion is not offered as an alternative to existing explanations that have been mainly dealing with factors and matters ‘from the top’ of society, such as changes in and of the political system (e.g. populism), the mass media (e.g. alarmism), the social organization of society (e.g. bureaucratization and/or industrialization), and globalization (e.g. imitation and/or internationalization of penal law). Rather, the hypothesis should be viewed as an important supplement to these existing theories and explanations.

The Ripple Effect: A Randomized Trial of a Social Norms Intervention in a Danish Middle School Setting

The paper reports on the results of an experiment on a brief social norms intervention in fifth and sixth grade Danish school classes. The intervention took the form of a randomized experiment, in which Treatment pupils were presented with data on their own misperceptions regarding cigarette smoking among their peers, followed by group discussions about normative misperceptions. Follow-up (n = 349) was conducted a year after intervention. Results. Significant differences between Treatment and Control in misperceptions were found, not only regarding smoking, but also regarding alcohol intake and drug misuse. No significant differences were found in actual smoking prevalence, but other types of risk behavior, including different types of criminal offenses, were significantly less prevalent in the Treatment group, as were the numbers of self-reported situations in which pupils had given in to (imagined) peer pressure. Conclusion. The experiment demonstrated the existence of a ripple effect: the correction of misperceptions regarding one type of risk behavior influenced other types of misperceptions and risk behaviors as well. It is hypothesized that an important contributory factor to the success of the experiment is the absence of any moral judgment in the intervention. In 2006, the experiment was given the European Crime Prevention Award.

The public sense of justice in Scandinavia : A study of attitudes towards punishments

Crime policy is increasingly legitimized by reference to the public sense of justice. A research project has therefore been conducted in all five Scandinavian countries in order to examine the public’s views on punishment. These views have been examined by means of simple questions in telephone interviews, by vignettes in postal questionnaires, and by focus groups having seen a film of a mock trial. The results show that, when asked simple questions, the public want stiffer sentences. In their assessments of the vignette crimes, the public demands on average lower prison sentences than judges, and this tendency becomes stronger in the focus group study. The propensities towards punitiveness seem to diminish with more information and increasing proximity to the parties involved.