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There is an acute shortage of places in Swedish prisons and detention centers, and in order to ease the situation, the Correctional Service is currently implementing a series of measures. One of them is that cells larger than six square meters are prepared to accommodate two inmates.
But there are great risks with double-coating the cells because they are not built for it, warns Christer Hallqvist, chairman of Seko’s Department of Correctional Services.
– The risk is that the Correctional Service is becoming a powder keg, he says to Ekot on Sveriges Radio.
When two inmates are locked up and then have to be together on the same surface, the risk of threats and violence increases, says Christer Hallqvist, recalling the rebellion at the prison in Tidaholm in the 1990s.
– It was also a frustration due to a concentration of inmates, but then we didn’t have double occupancy, he says.
Another measure that the Correctional Service has taken to create more places is to convert two-thirds of the visiting rooms in institutions in security class 1 and 2 into cells.