It seems that Norway's penal system, the one that a certain politically-motivated mass murderer is apt to end up in, as revealed by a recent article in "Foriegn Policy," is not precisely hell on earth.
What I find most interesting about this, though, is not the view Norway takes of crime and punishment; it's the view we in the United States take of the view Norway takes. That is, if we take the article cited above as our model, incredulity.
"What? Flat screen TV's? Private bathrooms? Fraternization with guards-- unarmed guards, at that? Pretty personal trainers? What?!"
Even as a staunch American leftist, I have to admit that my reaction, my gut feeling, looks an awful lot like the tone of the above-cited article. But should it?
The emotionally-satisfying answer to an act that causes us personal or societal anguish is to punish it, to return pain for pain. This is the approach we take in the United States. The wave may be cresting (we'll see), but for decades, now, we've made it our aim and priority to serve up heaping helpings of (what we mostly justify as) deterrance with a side order (or, perhaps, main course?) of retribution. Oh, we come up with other justifications: isolating a malefactor from the rest of society so that he can't do any more harm is a good one, but that purpose seems a bit undermined by the fact that, even though our recidivism rates are on the high side of frightening (51.4% back in jail within 3 years, by last count, which admittedly isn't all that recent), we don't make it too much of a habit to lock prisoners up (and so keep them away from the rest of us) forever.
So: how does that actually work out for us? Well, let's see: in an index of the entire planet, we have the highest per capita prison population, at 743 prisoners per 100,000 persons. The total overall population was almost 2.3 million as of 2007. Ah-- yes, and we do have that 51.4% back-to-jail rate.
Norway, which seems to so coddle its most terrible people, apparently has 73 prisoners per 100,000 heads. That is, it has less than 10% of ours. Its recidivism rate, which I'm having trouble finding official statistics on (possibly because I don't speak Norwegian), keeps being reported as about 20%. Even accounting for cultural differences, that seems like a serious effectiveness gap.
The sense of justice we've developed in this country seems to glorify instant karma, of a sort: "If you do bad things, bad things will be done to you." We are expected to fear prison in much the same way and for much the same reasons as religious Christians might fear the wrath of an angry God: fearsome retribution. We like redemption stories, but it doesn't seem like we, as a culture, really believe in redemption.
Or, perhaps, we're unwilling to believe that redemption is or ever could be the rule, rather than the rare exception.
Yet, if by treating those who would reform our prisoners as naive, and the prisoners themselves as repeat offenders waiting to happen, we end up fulfilling our own prophecies about them-- if, in fact, we are generating our own repeat offenders using "tough" methods that satisfy our visceral desire to see the wicked suffer, but which, from the perspective of reducing crime, does not work-- which side, really, is being naive?
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