The Power of Biography: Criminal Policy, Prison Life, and the Formation of Criminal Identities in the Swedish Welfare State

This chapter aims to reflect about the power that is exercised in autobiographical accounts. Criminal policy ultimately shows how everyday life, identities, and biographies are constituted. The criminal policy of the Swedish welfare state was founded on the ideology of treatment and social engineering. Looking at the prison as a training camp helps me to see how the norms are impressed on people, the criminal identity is formed, and the frameworks for the biography are outlined. The internal punishments that occur in prisons, for example, infrequently lead to promotion in the criminal identity formation. The main instrument of power in the construction of outsiderhood was the biographies compiled of the inmates. The role of imprisonment in controlling and readjusting a small, deviant criminal minority is insignificant. The often punishment is used, the less effective it becomes. It erases all forms of moral responsibility in the person to whom it is applied.