> The rate of recidivism in Norway is around 20%. So only 1 in 5 end up back in prison, while the majority of people (4 in 5) don’t return to prison within a few years.
> This is a sharp contrast to even the neighbor countries like Sweden with 61% and Denmark with 63%. American prisons tend to have around 60 – 75 % in most states, but it varies a lot by state.
There is no reason that the US can't do this. The US is a wealthy country. The US has oil money of its own that it could invest. The US already spends a great deal on the prison system. This would just be spending some of that money differently.
One could start by not putting as many folks in prisons and jails. You don't have to be a wealthy country to do that.
> There is no reason that the US can't do this. The US is a wealthy country.
Besides being wealthy, isn't Norway pretty culturally/ethnically homogeneous? That may be a pretty important factor that may contribute to making their policy choices work.
Similarly, isn't it a welfare state? That could also play a pretty significant role, too.
Besides being wealthy, isn't Norway pretty culturally/ethnically homogeneous?
I dunno. I'm an immigrant here, and my view might be skewed. That said, my own life has more diversity than it ever did in the US - I'm from the midwest. More types of folks. And I don't live in Oslo. That's no real reason that jails in the US can't be better and actually treat people like people that are going to live next door to you in the future. Being diverse isn't a reason to give long jail sentences or avoid jail/prison for more things. You certainly don't need a homogenous culture to do that sort of thing.
And yes, it is a welfare state, which means there are slightly fewer desperate people. I don't view that as a good thing - some of the folks here would just be left to die in the US. Some things also just mean a less stressful life - you know, like health care not making you go broke. It isn't perfect, mind you, and folks still fall through the cracks, but I'm sure it helps.
> One could start by not putting as many folks in prisons and jails. You don't have to be a wealthy country to do that.
Norway is able to put fewer people in prison because it puts more emphasis on crime prevention. The US chose a different path a long time ago, probably even as far back as the war on drugs. It's going to be very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube again, if that's even possible.
Norway is able to put less people in prison because less people in Norway commit crime. The murder rate in the United States is almost 15 times greater.
Norway also has trillions of dollars in its sovereign wealth fund. Like they could all stop working tomorrow and be fine for a couple of years living off their national savings account.
The returns from that sovereign wealth fund are already included in the GDP figures. Yes, having savings is useful but that’s largely offset up the high costs of being so far north.
> The returns from that sovereign wealth fund are already included in the GDP figures.
No, they aren’t (except that the production that produces them is, for domestic investments), because investment returns aren’t finished goods and services, and GDP is the aggregate value of finished goods and services produced. Counting investment returns on top of that would be double counting for domestic investment, and counting something completely outside for foreign investments.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. By returns I mean the impact on the economy from extracting money from the oil fund which first did in 2016. Essentially the fund had zero impact to their economy before 2016.
There’s significant debate around how much money should be taken from the fund to subsidize government services, but simply having money in an account they aren’t accessing doesn’t change the day to day finances.
Being the national equivalent of independently wealthy does sort of change the sort of risks you're able to take, even without actually dipping into the fund. I don't think GDP captures this fact at all.
Norway is far richer than US on a per-capita basis. Also, US mean wealth is a lot higher than its median wealth (which is what really counts). Any dirt-poor country could print money to give a few trillion dollars of nominal wealth to a single dictator and achieve a high mean wealth but everyone else in the country would be dirt poor.
Someone should tell that to our government. Meanwhile we've (USA) been taking spending shortcuts and borrowing against our future to enable GDP growth over the same time period with no return in sight.
Not the wealth plays major role here, but relatively small difference between richest and poorest people, that makes crime rates quite low in Norway.
Having people in prison for a shorter period is still cheaper than having them come back again and again. For smaller crimes people are allowed to go home for the evenings/weekends and the biggest punishment really is loosing the ability to work.
I guess that this can prevent people from completely loosing touch with outside world which makes it easier to go back to a normal life.
Possibly, but if you're hinting a racist point, Norway has more immigrants than Denmark (per Capita), and a larger fraction of their immigrants are from Africa.
As a Swede, I agree. Even official reports agree with this nowadays. 10 years or so ago it was not ok to even breath a word about this in Sweden, nothing bad came from immigration, but with the success of the right-wing Svergigdemokraterna it became a lot more ok to talk about systemic problems in Sweden.
It's not enough to agree. You'll have to actually show evidence of what OP was hinting. To remind you, he was hinting that Norway's better recidivism rates than Denmark and Sweden was due to its people.
So: Can you show any such evidence? Because from where I sit, it certainly looks like Norway has more African and middle easters immigrants than Denmark, but still have more of them employed and have lower recidivism rates. So.... Where do you get it from?
Even without US specifics, prison systems seem to not have adapted to the declined birth rate. Maybe the luxury of measuring the system by recidivism rate is more affordable for societies now.
I feel like a big part of it boils down to why steal/do illegal shit when you don't have to. In a place like Norway so many of your needs are going to be taken care of by the state.
That's nice, but before you raise prisoners' standard of living to that, you have to do it for everyone. I would like that. But that is often missed in these debates...
This is an important topic. Why is this thread flagged?
My uniforms when I worked for the US military were made by people we US citizens enslaved (glad to see other references to the 13th amendment here); I am not proud of that fact. I learned about it in school, as a teacher sitting in on a class taught by the social studies teacher.
If I were in prison I would want:
A sense of hope that I could learn and grow and continue to be a full and dignified human until I die. To this end, counseling, teaching, work that pays fairly, and general social, emotional, and intellectual rehabilitation within my zone of proximal development (teacher jargon per Lev Vygotsky) would be appropriate, and worth taxpayer expense, regardless of what I did to end up in prison.
Frodo told Gandalf he wished Bilbo had killed Gollum when Bilbo had the chance, and Gandalf said no- we don't know what good anyone might do in their lifetime. This convinced me that the death penalty is wrong. Banishment is better, and even better with rehabilitation efforts. I accept the risk that a relative few people in a well-designed system will still do more harm than good.
The thread is flagged, because HN is marketing branch of YCombinator, and publishing information that's inconvenient to their business partners isn't in their best interests.
Of course the admins will claim this isn't the case, but there's no reason to believe them, and lying is commercial companies' standard modus operandi.
The thread was flagged by community members. Admins didn't moderate it and in fact, after looking at the article (which a user emailed and asked us to do), I've turned the flags off.
This is bog standard HN moderation and has zero to do with "business partners", whoever those are.
> The thread is flagged, because HN is marketing branch of YCombinator, and publishing information that's inconvenient to their business partners isn't in their best interests.
No, it's flagged because it's one of those controversial political topics that often leads to polarized slapfights and flamewars.
And that's proven by the a number of inflammatory, flamebait comments already in this thread.
Funny I’ve seen threads like that hit the front page and never get flagged. Hell I’ve seen some pretty explicit violations of the guidelines hit the front page and stay there plenty of times. Where are all the rules lawyers in those threads?
You can claim that anyone who even hints that maybe two countries with very different demographics may in fact have differences due to those demographics is racist and that any comments along those lines are just inflammatory flamebait, but people will continue to ponder that theory because 1) it seems fucking obvious and 2) curious people (and people in general I guess) can't help but be interested in topics that they're told not to be interested in.
Now that you (and others) have flagged the thread, the people with showdead on will see that it has happened yet again, and they just might seek out a place where an actual discussion can be had.
Just to point out the detail, slavery is totally legal in the USA AS A PUNISHMENT FOR A CRIME:
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
(The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution)
Personally I think you need to NOT brutalize people if you want them to be rehabilitated. But you also SHOULD NOT enjoy prison. And deterrent is important (for both rehabilitation and preventing crimes in the first place).
> Just to point out the detail, slavery is totally legal in the USA AS A PUNISHMENT FOR A CRIME:
>> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
You're misreading that. The exception applies to involuntary servitude not slavery.
If I'm wrong, prove it: point me to the prison website where they offer convicts for sale.
> If I'm wrong, prove it: point me to the prison website where they offer convicts for sale.
But they do - in the modern version. Just like we have - here in my native Germany in a very big way over the last two decades - made actually employing people, as too inflexible and too expensive, a thing of the past for hundreds of thousands, and instead lend them out to companies, you don't need to deal with the hassle of actually owning someone. After all, what does any slave owner actually want? Not the slave, that's just "costs" and a lot of effort (infrastructure, overseers, security etc.). No, all they want is their labor. And that is exactly what those prisons sell, no? All the benefits without the disadvantages in one convenient cheap package.
I have no idea why you focus on the unimportant part of slavery, the one that was always inconvenient for the slave owners, the one that only contributed to the "cost" side of their business.
I would also like to take the liberty of pointing to this page about "Disputing Definitions" when trying to dissect some non-existent god-given very exact and always valid no matter the changing context meaning of some word: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...
The US has to make prison cruel because it also makes being poor cruel.
Brejvik probably has a better life in a Norwegian prison than a poor addict has in the USA. So if a poor addict can improve their life by going to prison, it's not much of an incentive to stay out of jail...
OTOH, Norway is one of the best nations of the world to be poor in. It's still no picnic, but being poor and free in Norway is still much better than being stuck in a "soft" Norwegian jail.
You could argue that any kind of enforced imprisonment where someone is placed in chains and unable to leave of their own accord could be a kind of slavery, even if well treated. So in that sense the exception could make sense.
But certainly it looks like it is time to amend that exception with further requirements for the humane treatment of prisoners.
> Being able to force someone to do anything against their will, minus the right to sell people, still sounds a lot like slavery to me.
It sounds like you have your definitions messed up. People being property is the defining characteristic of slavery. That would almost always entail involuntary servitude, but involuntary servitude is a more general term that encompasses other practices.
Also "being able to force someone to do anything against their will" certainly doesn't apply to prisoners in the US any other developed country.
> Allow incarcerated workers the same labor protections afforded to other workers in the United States, including minimum wage, health and safety standards, unionization, protection from discrimination, and speedy access to redress when their rights are violated.
I am not sure how well unionization would work, though I suspect the various mafia leaders in prison and the Aryan brotherhood leaders who are in prison would love to have a way to legally organize large groups of prisoners.
Part of the issue is that in US ( for example, IL ), the prison slave labor ( yes, based on constitution, slavery is abolished for all purposes except prison time ) is considered essential to some services[1]. The weird thing is, general population accepts it as: "Well, duh. They criminals."
To say the nation (the many varied people of the US) is at ease with torture is propaganda. In my opinion, certain elements of the state (the government of the US) are at ease with torture and it should be focused on those responsible. Words matter especially right now when Ruzzia is propagandizing everything to find allies for their illegal war.
>Words matter especially right now when Ruzzia is propagandizing everything to find allies for their illegal war.
This is actually a good argument, and one of the reasons I've been abstaining from criticising western countries lately. But now the world consensus on Russian invasion has been reached, support for Ukraine is working full speed, so I think I can return to my regularly scheduled programme.
If you don't give them something to do most of them watch TV, exercise and play cards all day. The work is intended to be punitive, because people can't stomach the idea of criminals having such easy lives.
Alternatively, we could provide more counseling, life-skills coaching and vocational education while treating them like human beings for a comparable cost to the taxpayer, and greatly reduce recidivism rates. That would eliminate a source of cheap labor benefitting political cronies and limit their ability to posture about being "tough" on crime though, so not gonna happen.
The work is meant to give them a routine and responsibilities. As they would have outside of the prison. Many prisons have the option to forego work and pursue education as well. I'm sure some prisons are not like this, but not all.
As others have pointed out, targetting recidivism rates would probably be the best way to tackle this problem. This means things like not allowing for discrimination on employment opportunities, a right to be forgotten, among other things.
Getting out of prison and being unable to secure a job is a huge problem. Of course they will go back to crime. It's not like going to a medium or low security prison is anything more than adult summer camp anyway.
Most prisons bait people into work via a combination of carrot and stick. Prisoners often lose privileges when they don't work, parole boards look very unfavorably on declining to work, and many prisons force prisoners to buy basic things like toothpaste and deodorant from a commissary out of their wages. Not working is not a reasonable option in the majority of cases.
Sounds like life in general frankly. There's also typically a heavy religious influence within prisons including helping people out with necessities. It's complicated.
That's not to say it is perfect by any means. I have friends who have been to prison that form my opinion and what impacts them most is not the prison but the society around them when they leave. They get passed over for jobs and end up on social assistance, social housing (when your rent cap is $376 and average rent is $1200 for a bachelor and your basic needs amount to $300 assuming you get some special diet).
> The rate of recidivism in Norway is around 20%. So only 1 in 5 end up back in prison, while the majority of people (4 in 5) don’t return to prison within a few years.
> This is a sharp contrast to even the neighbor countries like Sweden with 61% and Denmark with 63%. American prisons tend to have around 60 – 75 % in most states, but it varies a lot by state.
And here is a NYT article on the same prison: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/the-radical-huma...