That's what prison in America is, but that's not what prison either has to be, or is everywhere else in the world.
If your goal is to torture people, America's system is very effective. If your goal is to rehabilitate people and make sure they don't go on to commit more crimes, America's system is an abject failure.
Recidivism in the US is 55% after 5 years, as compared to Norway's 20%. Apparently not treating people inhumanely is a great way of getting them not to commit more crimes. [1] Who would have thought?
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...
I'm no defender of the US prison system, but why compare the US to Norway, a country with:
* a population of 5 million Norwegians, the descendants of whom actually rank very high in socioeconomic indicators in the US
* one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world, thanks in large part to being one of the highest per capita oil exporters in the world for decades
Why does this matter?
> one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world, thanks in large part to being one of the highest per capita oil exporters in the world for decades
Their GDP per capita is almost identical to the US. (And the US has tons of oil too for what it's worth.)
A smaller polity also tends to mean a much more accountable government which might be expected to be much more effective at implementing any policy.
>>Their GDP per capita is almost identical to the US.
Nominal per capita GDP is $5,000 higher.
The country also has a population that is 80X smaller. Smaller population size tends mean much smaller regional variations in socioeconomic conditions and fewer regions with the extreme conditions associated with high crime rates and pervasive criminal sub-cultures.
Because it is currently fashionable in the US to esteem, exalt, or even hallow many things Scandavian. If you live in the US, you’ve no doubt seen this.
To many in the US, the Scandavians have just nailed it everything social-economic. Personally, I wish we’d take more influence from their diet (fish! fish! more fish!)
I mean, the furthest you can get from fresh fish in Norway is pretty different to what is seen in most the US. I'm not sure that Fish is the answer there
- desperate people will do desperate things to survive
- oppressed people are bound to lash out
- the poor are powerless against authority
- people in poorer neighbourhoods are prone to overpolicing
- destitute people are more likely to succumb to substance abuse
If he said recidivism or crime rates were higher because the population was black/hispanic/etc, that would obviously be racist.
I would imagine that wealth, cultural homogeneity, and a very small population accounts for at least 80% of the explanation. So not the “whole” explanation, but the critical mass of why it works, sure.
It’s questionable to assume that Norway’s system could scale up by a factor of even 3x, let alone something sixty times the size. I’d be interested if it could produce results in a country like Spain or France with 50m people before calling on the US to simply do what Norway does but with 350m people.
Basically 1 in 5 ex convicts return to crime.
On the other hand, prisons entirely create problems they're supposedly there to solve. Just ask people who've gone through juvenile detention if it's not a breeding ground to make some contacts and learn the ropes..
You'd almost need a compound unit like (reconviction rate at x years) * (prison population/total population) in order to figure out what is going on, with the idea that you'd want both reconvictions and proportion of population in prison to be low numbers.
For reference, the US has 655 prisoners per 100k, Norway has 60 per 100k.
Another thing to note is some base it on reconviction, instead of reimprosonment, which obfuscate the data again.
A decent summary of some research done in 2020 in recidivism rates: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...
X/5 convicts return to crime because it is all they know and their peer group, family, and professional network are all infected by crime and their childhoods were marked by abuse, neglect, drugs, stress, anxiety, and isolation from healthy and stable human relationships. Good, well to do people like to pretend they are better than the lower classes but seriously undervalue their own good luck.
You can give an exconvict a bath, haircut, and paper degree all you want but at the end of the day the average citizen will still see them as scum and irreversibly damaged. Good luck finding a good job as a minority or (to a lesser degree) otherwise with any kind of record. The truth is that the punishment for a crime doesn’t end with one’s first stint in prison but continues for life.
Criminals are made far more often than they are born and the system is too quick to affirm the idea that they are little better than animals. No surprise to me that many return to crime.
Your mistake is in not realizing that this is considered a feature, not a bug. The US incarceration system is very much designed so that "certain people" stay in prison for the majority of cradle to grave. It is not in the interest of this design that recidivism be reduced.
[1] http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimu...
There's a thousand other ways America is different from Norway. The quote statistic -> unwarranted conclusion -> logic dunk! shitposting ruins websites.
