MALMO: Sweden has experienced such a sharp drop in the number of prison admissions over the last two years that its justice authorities have decided to close down 4 prisons and a remand centre.

“We have seen an out-of-the-ordinary decline in the number of inmates,” said Nils Oberg, the head of Sweden’s prison and probation services.

“Now we have the opportunity to close down a part of our infrastructure that we don’t need at this point of time.”

Prison numbers in Sweden, which have been falling by around one per cent a year since 2004, dropped by six per cent between 2011 and 2012 and are expected to do the same again both this year and next year, Oberg said.

As a result, the prison service has this year closed down prisons in the towns of Aby, Haja, Batshagen, and Kristianstad, two of which will probably be sold, and two of which will be passed for temporary use to other government authorities.

Oberg said that while nobody knew for sure why prison numbers had dropped so steeply, he hoped that Sweden’s liberal prison approach, with its strong focus on rehabilitating prisoners, had played at least a part.

“We certainly hope that the efforts we invest in rehabilitation and preventing relapse of crime has had an impact, but we don’t think that this could explain the entire drop of six per cent,” he said.

In an opinion piece in Sweden’s DN newspaper in which he announced the closures, Oberg said that Sweden needed to work even harder on rehabilitating prisoners, doing more to help them once they have returned to society.

Courts have given more lenient sentences for drugs offences following a ruling of the country’s supreme court in 2011, explaining at least part of the sudden drop in admissions.

According to Oberg, there were about 200 fewer people serving sentences for drugs offences in Sweden last March than a year previously.

Prison services will retain the option to reopen two of the closed prisons should the number of inmates rise.

“We are not at the point of concluding that this is a long-term trend and that this is a change in paradigm,” Oberg said. “What we are certain of is that the pressure on the criminal justice system has dropped markedly in recent years.”

By arrangement with the Guardian