By Torben Haugaard Jensen, AAU Communication and Public Affairs. Photo: AAU

Danish prisons are overcrowded and cases are pouring in to the courts. Our criminal justice system is under increasing pressure and a solution is needed.

At the same time, the Danish Parliament is discussing how we process bills, including in the area of criminal law. Are things moving too fast? And does rapid case processing affect the quality of the laws?

New research from Aalborg University shows a significant increase in the amount of legislation in criminal law which can have a direct impact on the criminal justice system.

We are enacting significantly more legislation than before and processing criminal law bills almost twice as quickly as before. This is according to Birgit Feldtmann, Professor of Criminal Law in the Department of Law, AAU.

"The possibilities for punishing behaviours and groups of people have expanded considerably, and maximum and minimum penalties have increased several times. We can punish more and for longer periods, and this can have a direct impact on how overcrowded our prisons are," says Birgit Feldtmann.

Results passed on to the Minister of Justice

The research findings come from the project "Punitive Turn, Danish Style: Den strafferetlige lovgivningsproces i Danmark" [Punitive Turn, Danish Style: The Criminal Law Legislative Process in Denmark] that examines all amendments to the Criminal Code in the period 1980-2022.

An interdisciplinary research group is behind the project that, in addition to Birgit Feldtmann, consists of Annette Olesen, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Work; as well as Kasper Jørgensen, PhD Fellow and Lene Wacher Lentz, Associate Professor, Department of Law.

The research group presented the results to the Danish Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee on 11 April. Interest was so great that the committee has now asked the Minister of Justice to comment on the results.

According to Birgit Feldtmann, this is due to the fact that several of the results speak directly to the debates in the Parliament about whether legislative work is moving too fast.

"We can show significant trends that support the presumption that legislative work is going much faster than before. The decline in the processing time of legislation is most pronounced between 1990-2000 and continues more subdued in the following years. With concrete numbers, we can demonstrate that this isn’t just a gut feeling. For example, we can also see that deadlines for commenting have become shorter. This has been a recurring issue for several decades," says Birgit Feldtmann.

Valuable input to legislators

The research group is currently working on a number of scientific articles that examine the findings of the research project in depth. The first article will be published at the end of May.

In addition, the research group is applying for funding for the next phase of the project that will deal with factors affecting the quality of legislation over the past 40 years.

Although the project has not been completed, according to Birgit Feldtmann, it has already had some effect.

"When the Legal Affairs Committee forwarded our preliminary findings to the Minister of Justice, we managed to put the issue of this trend in the criminal law on the agenda. Hopefully, we will help get legislators to reflect on this issue," says Birgit Feldtmann.

Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication and Public Affairs.