In recent decades Sweden’s liberal crime policy has been replaced by tough on crime policies. The conventional criminological answer, regarding it as a turnout of right-wing policy, overlooks the importance of the specific historical settings in Sweden, and the argument of this paper is that the changes in the trajectory of crime policy ought to be regarded as a shift in the rationale of governance modifying the Swedish state’s self-understanding; substituting the welfare state with the judicial state. This governance focuses on the maintenance of territory instead of the care of the population, and the transition shows itself in the shift from remedying social problems through social policy to managing public order problems by means of crime policy. My argument will be that this historical break with the modernist rationale, brought on by the downfall of the rehabilitative ideal, led to a crime policy focusing on risk, risk-assessment, and criminogenic situations, producing a policy centring in on territory and geographical aspects of crime. A process strengthened by a what I see as a dualization of the crime problem, furthering a territorial focus of by the idea of protecting either the open society or the civil society.