Worth noting that rates don't necessarily tell the whole story. In some countries you will avoid prison entirely for a whole range of offences including even so

Worth noting that rates don't necessarily tell the whole story. In some countries you will avoid prison entirely for a whole range of offences including even some "heavy" things. It's not impossible that in countries like Norway or Denmark, people who are in prison are already statistically part of the people less likely to be rehabilitated. 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.