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Making sense of statutory penalty ranges: Proportionality and penalty value in Sweden

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  • Axel Holmgren
Axel Holmgren
Stockholm university
Bio

Published 2026-04-21

Keywords

  • penalty value,
  • penal value,
  • proportionality,
  • just deserts,
  • sentencing,
  • sentencing rationalities,
  • Swedish criminal law,
  • statutory penalties,
  • preventive turn,
  • punitive turn
    • ...More
    Less

Copyright (c) 2026 Axel Holmgren

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

“Making sense of statutory penalty ranges: Proportionality and penalty value in Sweden: Zrozumienie ustawowego wymiaru kar: proporcjonalność i wartość kary w Szwecji” (2026) Archives of Criminology, p. 27 pp. doi:10.7420/AK2025.19.
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Abstract

This article examines what it can mean for a sentencing system to be built on proportionality, using the Swedish notion of penalty value (straffvärde) as a case study. Penalty value translates the seriousness of an offence into the severity of the penalty, and it structures both statutory scale-setting and judicial sentencing. The analysis contrasts a desert-based account centred on blameworthiness with instrumental accounts in which seriousness is calibrated to preventive or expressive aims. Set against a period of rapid legislative change – involving reforms on organised crime, sexual offences and honour-related crimes – it illustrates how these rationalities interact in the construction of statutory penalty ranges. The article concludes by developing two ideal types and a third, less ideal-typical model to make systematic sense of this interaction. Methodologically, this reconstruction engages criminal policy from within the system’s normative structure.

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