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Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment - could it catch on?

• nodata 13y ago
  This didn't seem like a daily mail article at all: it was pretty balanced, almost welcoming of a different approach.
• vidarh 13y ago
  [2011] It is fascinating to see the kind of mental gymnastics some people try to engage with in response to these reoffending rates. It's particularly worth pointing out that this was/is an experiment even by Norwegian standard. Norway's prisons used to be horrible 100-150 years ago - we used to have prisons where people would be kept in iron and used for forced heavy manual labour, and kept in dark miserable cells. But it was clear that it didn't really work. The system was getting miserable results whether you cared about reoffending rates, cost, human rights or whatever measure you might care about other than pure vengeance. Rather than trying more of the same, which seems to be the common reaction, the criminal justice system has continuously been subject to experiments that has been focused on outcomes, and nearly every time, the experiments ends up evidence supporting a more and more lenient system whether you are looking at costs to society, reoffending rates or other factors. Even satisfaction for victims is better served by reforms that focus on reconciliation than harsh punishment (people who consent to meet with victims or relatives of victims to explain themselves can in certain circumstances receive substantially reduced sentences).