Attitudes and public punishment preferences: Finnish results of Scandinavian sense of justice research

Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that populations favour severe penalties for offenders. However, surveys using a case vignette method, where the attributes of the case described to the respondents are varied, produce more versatile results. Such research gives a nuanced picture of punitive attitudes. In this study, the sentence decisions of laypeople who are informed about the offender’s criminal history, ethnic background, gender, social issues and substance abuse were examined.

A representative mail survey collected in Finland as part of Scandinavian sense of justice research was used as empirical data. Respondents were presented with six criminal cases and asked to determine sentences for them. All respondents received the same vignettes, but the background attributes of the offenders varied randomly.

This study showed that all the background attributes had a clear connection to the sentence decisions. Considering these results, the idea of a ‘general punitive attitude’, which is commonly used in academic literature, appears to be too simple of a way to look at the relationship between attitudes and punishment decisions.     

Accountability and psychiatric disorders: How do forensic psychiatric professionals think?

Swedish penal law does not exculpate on the grounds of diminished accountability; persons judged to suffer from severe mental disorder are sentenced to forensic psychiatric care instead of prison. Re-introduction of accountability as a condition for legal responsibility has been advocated, not least by forensic psychiatric professionals. To investigate how professionals in forensic psychiatry would assess degree of accountability based on psychiatric diagnoses and case vignettes, 30 psychiatrists, 30 psychologists, 45 nurses, and 45 ward attendants from five forensic psychiatric clinics were interviewed. They were asked (i) to judge to which degree (on a dimensional scale from 1 to 5) each of 12 psychiatric diagnoses might affect accountability, (ii) to assess accountability from five case vignettes, and (iii) to list further factors they regarded as relevant for their assessment of accountability. All informants accepted to provide a dimensional assessment of accountability on this basis and consistently found most types of mental disorders to reduce accountability, especially psychotic disorders and dementia. Other factors thought to be relevant were substance abuse, social network, personality traits, social stress, and level of education.     

Taking It Out on the Body? A Phenomenological Study of Young Adults’ Gendered Experiences of Depression and Antidepressant Use

In this article, we use in-depth interviews with young adults in Sweden to explore the gendered and embodied experiences of depression and antidepressant use. Building upon previous phenomenological research, we analyse being depressed and on antidepressants as altered embodied states, in which corporealization—experiencing the body as a material object—is central. Feminist interventions by Toril Moi and Iris Marion Young inform our analysis of embodiment as gendered. The bodily facets of depression include the weight of the anxious body in crying and not sleeping, as well as the weakened or distorted relationship between body, mind and world in brooding thoughts and hopelessness. These experiences of corporealization are not expressed in gendered terms but, when acted out in depression, they do appear to be gendered. The female body becomes “the first battleground”—as the socially endorsed object upon which to act destructively. In contrast, male behaviour is not expressed as self-destructive, but projects in the world are emphasized at the cost of (bodily) well-being. Although antidepressants lift the corporeal weight of anxiety and low mood, they install a new, and in some respects more profound, corporealization of the body. This is expressed as feeling and caring less and being like a thing or machine. It can be understood in terms of an increased distance from the world—not articulated in gendered terms. As a way of existing in the world, the medicated state bears strong similarities to the depressed state from which it was originally an effort to escape. Thus, taking medication can be seen as yet another way of acting on the body as object. Furthermore, it could be suggested from our findings that when the body is not felt—when there is a breakdown of the meaningful relationship between the body and the world—the experience is less gendered.     

Managers’ Turnover in the Public Sector—The Role of Psychosocial Working Conditions

An important challenge for public organizations is to attract and retain skilled managers. The present study explores how profiles of psychosocial working conditions, assessed by the combination of managerial-specific job demands and job resources, longitudinally predict managers’ turnover intentions and actual turnover in Swedish municipalities. Considerable effects of managers’ psychosocial working conditions on turnover intentions but not on actual turnover were found. Thus, poor working conditions may result in psychologically detached managers in public organizations, which may have considerable and costly effects on both the organizations and the managers, in terms of decreased commitment, performance, and impaired health.     

Organisations as Epistemic Capital: the Case of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions

Why do national organisations proliferate in practically all areas of policymaking and organisational life, and why are they involved in supranational networks and organisations? The article approaches this mystery by exploring how organisations are built and used as authorities in domestic policymaking. The empirical focus is on the establishment of the institution of children’s ombudsman and its uses in influencing Finnish child policy. The theory developed in the article suggests that organisations are accumulations of authority, here termed epistemic capital, which is the primary reason that they are established and sustained. Once these are institutionalised, various actors can use the authority of organisations to legitimate their policy objectives. The case of independent children’s rights institutions shows how this mechanism operates in child policy. The Finnish office of the ombudsman for children has worked actively to become an established ontological and moral authority in child policy, and it has also attempted to utilise the mandate and authority of the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the state into more child-friendly policy decisions.