jumpingjacktrash:

oligopsoneia:

ryanthedemiboy:

oligopsoneia:

outrhven:

twinkrightsactivist:

charlesoberonn:

Norwegian prisons are nicer than my apartment.

holy shit dude

Norway also has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%.

Amazing what happens when you don’t jail non-violent drug offenders for profit and treat people with basic compassion. Prison should, in most cases, be about rehabilitation and not punishing already likely traumatized people with the mandate of surviving hell on earth.

Also relevant: although focused on years in prison vs. quality of years in prison, Open Philanthropy’s comprehensive review of incarceration policy in the US suggests that, although increasing the probability of being caught for a crime has a deterrent effect, 1) there is almost no deterrent effect for harsher sentences, 2) every year spent in prison increases the chances (causally, not just through worse prisoners being in longer, because you can look at natural experiments in judge harshness) of recidivism, because prison lowers non-criminal human/social capital while raising criminal human/social capital, in addition to be psychologically brutalizing. The bottom line is that a year in prison, at least at the margin and in the US, has zero net effect on crime outside of prison, because the impact on recidivism cancels out the physical inability to commit crimes in the civilian world while imprisoned (while obviously involving a lot of suffering, whether immediately carried out by the system or by prisoners on each other, inside prison.) I’m not informed enough to say what we should replace it with, but America’s prison system - and no doubt many others - is one of political terror and needless cruelty, not a rational attempt to manage and reduce harms.

Does somebody want to translate the previous person’s response into plain English for me, please?

putting people in prison, at least the way america does, makes them more criminal, so prison creates as much crime as it prevents

harsh prisons are a school for crime. norway’s prisons are rehab for crime.

this is at least partly on purpose, as american prisons are privatized, so more crime makes more money.

the idea that prison must be a punishment rather than a solution, and that emotional catharsis for the law-abiding public is more important than lowering the crime rate, is largely the result of propaganda and manipulation. politicians with a financial stake in the privatized prison business have preyed on the playground revenge instinct to convince the voting public that any change away from the profitable model is ‘soft on crime’.