SD pushes indefinite security detention for child sex offenders

Sverigedemokraterna (SD) is trying to make “public safety” synonymous with “no end date.” In the wake of SVT’s Uppdrag granskning programme “Jakten,” which highlighted that sexual crimes against children can yield comparatively low sentences, SD is now pushing for indefinite confinement—explicitly framed as the default outcome.

According to SVT News, SD deputy party leader Henrik Vinge says offenders who “act on” paedophilia should be locked up “for an indefinite period” until authorities can make a “safe assessment” that there is no risk of reoffending. The party’s starting point, Vinge says, is that the sentence should not be time-limited.

The proposal is linked to the new Swedish sanction “säkerhetsförvaring” (security detention), a measure developed by the Tidö parties and set to take effect in April. As described by SVT, the sanction is intended for people who have committed—or relapsed into—serious violent and sexual offences.

What SD adds is not merely tougher sentencing rhetoric, but a conceptual shift: punishment becomes contingent on administrative risk assessment rather than a court-imposed endpoint. The state would be asked to imprison people until some expert system declares them safe.

Svenska Dagbladet reports SD wants to extend this logic beyond hands-on abuse to include child pornography offences as a baseline trigger for security detention. That is a major escalation: it treats possession or distribution offences—already serious—under the same open-ended framework designed for the most dangerous repeat violent criminals.

The political theatre also includes a side debate over chemical castration. KD leader Ebba Busch has argued for chemical castration as a condition for conditional release; the Moderates have echoed the idea. Vinge’s response is revealing: he says it is “hard to see” how it could be reasonable to grant conditional release at all, given the “high” risk of recidivism.

Emergency criminal policy is built by starting with a category everyone hates, then normalising a legal structure that can be reused. Indefinite detention regimes rarely remain confined to their original targets. Once the state has a way to incarcerate “until risk is gone,” the natural bureaucratic incentive is to expand the list of risks.

The rule-of-law problem is not sympathy for offenders; it is the removal of a fixed, reviewable boundary on state coercion. A prison term is, at least in theory, a debt paid. “Until we feel safe” is a blank cheque—especially when “we” means agencies whose reputations are destroyed by the one case they misjudge, and never harmed by the thousands they over-detain.

SD says it will push the issue in future coalition negotiations and believes it can become reality if the Tidö parties win a majority in the autumn election, SVT reports. For voters, the choice is whether Sweden wants to treat criminal sentencing as adjudication—or as an ongoing administrative precaution where the exit door is controlled by the same system that locked it in the first place.