I'll give you this is a correlation-causation situation. That said, I see little reason to believe that intrinsic to being American is that 1% of the population should be in prison and of them 75% will have another go at it, when both these numbers dwarf the rest of the developed world.
America has some features that most developed counties don't, like a racial underclass and larger percentage of lower income families. There is also just something wrong with cultures in North & South America. We have really high murder rates in general.
America is sort of unique in that we have very strong rule of law but also have relatively high crime.
Also those recidivism rates you cited are apples and oranges. The US rate includes rearrest and the Norway is re-imprisonment.
This https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/table/p... attempt at apples to apples suggets the US is 36% compared to Norway's 20%. That's a big difference but other western nations are higher than evne ours. Canada, France, Netherlands, Germany, etc. all have similar recidivism rates.
The Scandinavian countries just have very little trouble makers it seems.
Well you see, all the Scandinavian troublemakers got onto boats and went a conquering. Eventually they started settling instead of conquering. So all the pansies stayed at home and bred more pansies and that's why modern Scandinavian countries have few troublemakers. As an example, the area around Manchester England was settled by the Scandinavian troublemakers and many of their descendants immigrated to the Americas (those who didn't became Football hooligans). Therefore the American troublemakers are actually a result of the Scandinavians shipping off all of their troublemakers. So it's all the Scandinavians fault.
