Pre-trial detention, or remand imprisonment, entails the confinement of individuals suspected of crime before conviction. Because it deprives those who are legally innocent of their liberty, it is the most intrusive procedural measure within the criminal justice process. In Sweden, this confinement is commonly intensified by restrictions: measures that limit contact both within and outside remand prisons to prevent interference with ongoing investigations, often producing conditions akin to solitary confinement. Although formally reserved for cases of strict necessity, restrictions were imposed on 81 percent of individuals at the outset of detention in 2025. For more than three decades, anti-torture and human rights bodies of the Council of Europe and the United Nations have repeatedly criticized both the extent of these practices and the severe harms they produce. Despite this, they have continued largely unchanged.

This thesis asks how Swedish remand practice has persisted despite sustained criticism and well-documented evidence of harm. Across three papers, it brings pre-trial detention into view as a distinct penal practice by tracing the development of remand use in Sweden between the 1960s and 2020 from a Nordic perspective (Paper I), examining the political processes shaping its legal regulation from the 1950s to 2023 (Paper II), and investigating how remand and restrictions are authorized in everyday legal practice (Paper III). Combining official statistics, documents from legislative reform processes, and interviews with legal actors, the thesis provides the first systematic multilevel examination of pre-trial detention in Sweden, encompassing its aggregate development, the making of its legal framework, and its interpretation and application in practice.

The thesis shows that remand use in Sweden is extensive and rising: viewed from a Nordic perspective, many people are detained each year, and Sweden is the only Nordic country in which annual admissions have risen steadily since the mid-2010s. Combined with the widespread use of restrictions, this marks a system whose reach is both substantial and expanding. These developments have unfolded despite longstanding political recognition of the harms of remand and isolation. Such recognition has repeatedly prompted legislative reform but yielded only gradual and partial restraint, as humanitarian and reductionist ambitions have been diluted, displaced, or overridden by the state’s crime control imperatives. The same pattern is evident in everyday legal decision-making: legal actors acknowledge the severity and harms of remand and isolation, but these concerns carry limited weight in the decisions that authorize them. Similarly, procedural safeguards intended to constrain practice—which have gradually been strengthened in the case of restrictions—are neutralized by the unequal distribution of information and power among the prosecution, the courts, and the defense.

From these findings, the thesis concludes that Swedish pre-trial practices persist not because the harms they produce are unknown or denied, but because those harms are accommodated within political agendas, legal frameworks, and institutional arrangements that permit their continuation—and, more recently, their expansion. In this respect, the thesis speaks beyond the Swedish case, offering a broader account of how penal harms are recognized, muted, and perpetuated through the ordinary workings of law and governance.