Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner.

Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem we’ve got. We could just not prosecute many non-violent crimes, like our District Attorney chose to do in San Francisco. But that didn’t pan out well and we now have the highest non-violent crime rate of any major US city.