wrveres wrote:Neato Torpedo wrote:Well obviously not, but Norway's prison system is geared much more towards rehabilitation while the U.S. is geared more towards punishment. An international recidivism survey with standardized parameters would be nice to cite but there hasn't been a reliable one done to my knowledge.
Edit:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/0 ... y-is-safe/Sure the site is biased but the sources and statistics aren't.
Well what your biased site fails to mention, is that Norway has about 3000 prisoners total. Its a very small country, with a very small population of 4 million. The United States has 2,245,000 inmates! It's a lot easier to "reeducate" 3000 people than it is 2.2 million. Heck you could probably give all 3000 their own "grief counselor" .. lol
Do the math and look at the % of the population in the U.S. is in prison compared to Norway (or really, any other industrialized country).
You'll see that the U.S. inmate populate dwarves any other country. We have 5% of the global population and 25% of the incarcerated population. Why? Because we criminalize and actively prosecute far more "crimes" than any other country.
When the U.S. is filling its prisons with people who violated statutes related to non-violent, consensual crimes (drug, prostitution, etc), it results in far more criminals than any other country. The massive amount of criminals, plus the fact that all the criminals are thrown into the same pot, is why nearly 70% of released prisoners released in the U.S. are arrested again within 3 years.