As someone who grew up around serious criminals, this number is far lower than what you’d see in North America and shows that Norway at least makes some progres

As someone who grew up around serious criminals, this number is far lower than what you’d see in North America and shows that Norway at least makes some progress. 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.