Why Scandanavian prisons are superior

[MillCreek]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why-scandinavian-prisons-are-superior/279949/?single_page=true

Interesting article, and more interesting to speculate why this approach could not happen here.

[Balog]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why-scandinavian-prisons-are-superior/279949/?single_page=true

Interesting article, and more interesting to speculate why this approach could not happen here.

relatively small and homogenous populations

Among other reasons.

[Ned Hamford]

Like most of what our government creates, our prisons are relics of politics and ideologies past; mutated by compromise and expediency.  Are prisons to reform, punish, or separate dangerous individuals from the rest of society? All of course; with folks working for cross purposes within and without; further complicated by the other spectrum aims of thrift and pork.

[Balog]

Like most of what our government creates, our prisons are relics of politics and ideologies past; mutated by compromise and expediency.  Are prisons to reform, punish, or separate dangerous individuals from the rest of society? All of course; with folks working for cross purposes within and without; further complicated by the other spectrum aims of thrift and pork.

And "We've got to do something! demagoguery that does things that are actually detrimental in order to boost politicians approval ratings. Too many guys with .15BAC's causing wrecks? Let's lower the legal limit to .06 so it'll be double sooper illegal when the same drunks with .15's cause accidents.

[AJ Dual]

The real shame of it is that American politics HAS a workable formula for detente on the "Tougher than you!" political cycle on crime and punishment.

The Left who makes noises, but never actually does anything about the injustice of incarceration rates could easily find common cause with the Right over fiscal responsibility, but never actually does anything about the cost savings to the taxpayer,  etc.

[K Frame]

I can tell you the freaking problem with the concept based on the teaser line...

"'Open' prisons, in which detainees are allowed to live like regular citizens, should be a model for the U.S."

What's being described is more like a halfway house, NOT a prison.

[Balog]

The article, in addition to being chock-a-block with silly white guilt nonsense, both states and then immediately ignores the biggest problem.

Most prisoners come from severely broken homes and communities with institutionalized poverty and criminality. Sticking one of these severely damaged individuals into a cushy resort prison won't have better results than what we do now. Between the destruction caused by the welfare state and the collapse of the family caused by the "sexual revolution" most of the Americans in our prison system essentially had no chance. But since libertine white guilt "progressives" afflicted with the soft racism of low expectations caused those problems in the first damn place they can't see that they caused this.

[roo_ster]

Q: Why Scandinavian <insert_institution_here> are superior?
A: Because everyone involved is Scandinavian.

Diversity in and of itself is corrosive to social capital and institutions(1).  Add in a "diverse" bit that has a shorter time horizon and less going on upstairs and it gets worse.





(1) Will never forget the co-worker from Minnesota descended from Norwegians and his utterly serious and vehement "Those damned Swedes!" outburst.

[SADShooter]

Q: Why Scandinavian <insert_institution_here> are superior?
A: Because everyone involved is Scandinavian.

Diversity in and of itself is corrosive to social capital and institutions(1).  Add in a "diverse" bit that has a shorter time horizon and less going on upstairs and it gets worse.





(1) Will never forget the co-worker from Minnesota descended from Norwegians and his utterly serious and vehement "Those damned Swedes!" outburst.

Beat me to the glogg, dammit.

[Firethorn]

Most prisoners come from severely broken homes and communities with institutionalized poverty and criminality. Sticking one of these severely damaged individuals into a cushy resort prison won't have better results than what we do now.

How could it be worse?

Between the destruction caused by the welfare state and the collapse of the family caused by the "sexual revolution" most of the Americans in our prison system essentially had no chance. But since libertine white guilt "progressives" afflicted with the soft racism of low expectations caused those problems in the first damn place they can't see that they caused this.

I'm going to be honest here:  I approach this from a fiscal responsibility standpoint.  To whit, a person in prison costs $30k+ a year.  Recidivism rates tend to be high, so they keep coming back.

I'm not going to say that we could transplant the Scandinavian system here without modification, but there are certainly lessons to be learned.

Please keep in mind that I'm focusing on prisons here - fixing the welfare state, destruction of families, education, and such will be left for a later time.

Our prison systems seem to be about as successful as the war on drugs.  Doubling down on the failed policies of the past - longer, tougher prison sentences, harsher prisons, and such DO NOT WORK.  Prisoners come out of them even more maladapted for life in public society than they did going in. 

The thing about 'It wouldn't work here!'?  It actually DOES.  There have been plenty of studies on the outcomes of various prisons, some of which actually do the reform thing.  All within the USA.  Proper reform prisons work.  They may not actually work for 'everybody', but if by changing policies we can take it from a 60% chance they'll come back to a 30% chance, with half the sentence (Scandinavian prisons are 20% recidivism vs our 60%, and sentences average 1/3rd ours), in my view it's worth it even if it doubles the prisoner cost per year from the reduced chance to return at all.  It doesn't cost double either. 

Get them in from the court, assess them and assign them to the appropriate programs.  Teach them life skills, get them their GED, teach them a trade, etc...  It's tough, but separate them from their gangs.  Instill healthy interactions in them.

Because really, can we afford to do anything less?

Hell, Saudi Arabia managed to figure out how to deprogram and rehabilitate religious extremist terrorists(the lower level minion/suicide bomber types at least). 

[vaskidmark]

Everybody wants criminals "rehabilitated".

That presumes that they were "habilitated" at one time.  Across racial and ethnic lines there is strong evidence that a large portion of those incarcerated were never "habilitated".

There is a model that some US prisons are using towards the end of the prison experience that does, more than anything else being done/tried, "habilitate" the participants.  Sadly, the number of slots available are abysmally small.  Also, sadly, the model works best when a prisoner can transition from the in-prison model to the free-community model where there is more support for practicing the newly-developed skills of "habilitation".

The vast majority of prison officials (from the bureaucrats to the cellblock guard) do not like the model as it moves the locus and focus of control from the prison hierarchy to the prison inmates participating in the program.  This is, at leasst for me, conceptually strange as the model comes from the mental health hospital system where it was implemented to control acting out/wierd behavior without requiring direct intervention by the staff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_community

Sadly, the feds glommed on to the concept as it applied to drug/alcohol treatment and still refuse to fund programs that do not focus solely on substance abuse.  (In spite of that, and the feds threats to stop funding programs that went beyound SA treatment, there are a very small number of programs in a few states that actually exclude addicts/alcoholics from participation.)

Outside the prison walls the best iteration of the concept I have seen/studied has been Delancy Street http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/circle.php  They started as a small, barely staying alive drug treatment program and have are now opening their 6th facility.  Their commercial enterprises (check them out at the website) have grown from essentially day labor outfits to a multimillion dollar empire.

Therapeutic communities are the very small side of the why-are-we-here triangle of prison operations; the biggest being punishment/incapacitation, the second (a holdover from colonial-era philosiphy) being penitence.

There is no way I can see the Americal penal system and the philosophy driving it having anything other than some minor window dresing changes.  The culture of quarientining criminals from the rest of society is too firmly entrenched.  There will always be individuals who those they deal with on a regular basis will accept back into the mainstream, but as a group it's not going to happen.

stay safe.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

No system works unless the person being habilitated, re or not, wants it ti happen. Often they do not have any interest in change


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[brimic]

(1) Will never forget the co-worker from Minnesota descended from Norwegians and his utterly serious and vehement "Those damned Swedes!" outburst.

Ole and Sven joke (making fun of Swedes) or Finnish jokes are pretty popular up Nort.

[HankB]

. . . I approach this from a fiscal responsibility standpoint.  To whit, a person in prison costs $30k+ a year.  Recidivism rates tend to be high, so they keep coming back.

How about outsourcing?

Russia has plenty of vacancies in their Soviet-era gulags, and I'm sure there's space in Turkish prisons as well; we can probably warehouse the real bad guys (rapists, murderers, etc.) for a couple of bucks a day. And, just to ensure "diversity" - I'll bet we can save even MORE money if we pay Zimbabwe or Swaziland or someplace else in Africa to store our bad guys with a long-term contract.

For that matter - assuming we put the bad guys up in conditions identical to what we provided for German/Japanese/Italian POWs during WWII - then what would it actually cost? Probably a lot less than $30k a year. Heck, we'd even be conforming to an internationally recognized standard of humane treatment - the Geneva Convention - so if anyone complained, we could just tell them to get stuffed.

[KD5NRH]

For that matter - assuming we put the bad guys up in conditions identical to what we provided for German/Japanese/Italian POWs during WWII - then what would it actually cost? Probably a lot less than $30k a year. Heck, we'd even be conforming to an internationally recognized standard of humane treatment - the Geneva Convention - so if anyone complained, we could just tell them to get stuffed.

Really not a bad idea.  I'd also like to see the lower-risk ones in what would amount to quarantined cities; they can live in a crappy barracks, eat jail food and do minimal work to cover some of those costs, or do real work to earn real benefits, whether internally for the prison system or brokered products and services for the open market.  Apartments for rent at market rate.  Houses if somebody's really willing to work.  Evening classes in useful trades.  Allow pretty much any benefit they could buy outside, with obvious exceptions, but alcohol and tobacco should be fine.  Monitored internet.  All they can't do is leave.  Screw up, and they go back to the regular prison for the remainder of the original sentence plus any needed addition.  If a city can run in the black, then such a prison should be fairly cheap once it's up and running.

[Firethorn]

Everybody wants criminals "rehabilitated".

That presumes that they were "habilitated" at one time.  Across racial and ethnic lines there is strong evidence that a large portion of those incarcerated were never "habilitated".

Question:  Your vehicle is part of a recall because something wasn't done right at the factory.  Would you say that it isn't being repaired?

Fine.  New prisoners come in condition F-Z, which is unacceptable to society for various reasons.  The goal is to 'fix' them, preferably into condition A, but even D is acceptable. 

We're 'rehabilitating' them because obviously the first habilitation didn't take, was wrong, etc...  So we're having a second go at it, with different people.  Unless they were raised by wildlife they have at least some habilitation training. 

There is a model that some US prisons are using towards the end of the prison experience that does, more than anything else being done/tried, "habilitate" the participants.  Sadly, the number of slots available are abysmally small.  Also, sadly, the model works best when a prisoner can transition from the in-prison model to the free-community model where there is more support for practicing the newly-developed skills of "habilitation".

All I propose is acknowledging that such programs work, and expanding it so the slots aren't so limited.

The vast majority of prison officials (from the bureaucrats to the cellblock guard) do not like the model as it moves the locus and focus of control from the prison hierarchy to the prison inmates participating in the program.  This is, at leasst for me, conceptually strange as the model comes from the mental health hospital system where it was implemented to control acting out/wierd behavior without requiring direct intervention by the staff.

It becomes a lot less weird if you consider 'most' criminal behavior as an outgrowth of mental illness, diagnosed and otherwise.  Reminds me a bit of the original series of Star Trek - where they only have 1 prison of like 20 inmates because they were successful in treating everybody else.  For a civilization that's interplanetary.

There will always be individuals who those they deal with on a regular basis will accept back into the mainstream, but as a group it's not going to happen.

Very few criminals aren't going to end up back in society.  Most eventually stop coming back.

No system works unless the person being habilitated, re or not, wants it ti happen. Often they do not have any interest in change

What makes you say that?  Part of the trick is making them realize that they do want to change.

How about outsourcing?

Too unstable, and they keep costing money regardless.  Russia, for example, will want to charge a heck of a lot more.  Prices are rising rapidly in China.  Etc...

Do your job right and they turn into taxpayers.  Now that's a good investment.

For that matter - assuming we put the bad guys up in conditions identical to what we provided for German/Japanese/Italian POWs during WWII - then what would it actually cost? Probably a lot less than $30k a year. Heck, we'd even be conforming to an internationally recognized standard of humane treatment - the Geneva Convention - so if anyone complained, we could just tell them to get stuffed.

Most of the costs savings there was that, not being defective criminals, you pretty much only had to guard a bit against escapes and such.  We treated them 'right' and they repaid this by going back to being good little workers in growing their own food and stuff.  Most were happy to simply be out of the fighting.  Hell, we sometimes gave the European POWs day passes! 

Really not a bad idea.  I'd also like to see the lower-risk ones in what would amount to quarantined cities; they can live in a crappy barracks, eat jail food and do minimal work to cover some of those costs, or do real work to earn real benefits, whether internally for the prison system or brokered products and services for the open market.

If you can trust them in those conditions why are we locking them up in 'prison'?  On the other hand, that would be like an advanced form of reform prison, because it's actually teaching them how to survive in the 'real world'.

[Balog]

It becomes a lot less weird if you consider that most criminal behavior as an outgrowth of mental illness, diagnosed and otherwise.  Reminds me a bit of the original series of Star Trek - where they only have 1 prison of like 20 inmates because they were successful in treating everybody else.  For a civilization that's interplanetary.

 

Always nice to be able to get the Slate/Salon/NPR perspective.

[Firethorn]

Always nice to be able to get the Slate/Salon/NPR perspective.

What's the saying?  "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."

Consider mental illness - people unable to cope, self destructive behaviors, inability to get along in society, etc...  How well does that fit with criminals?

edit: Which do you want to do more: punish criminals, or make so they stop doing crimes?  Because we've pretty much proven the former doesn't work.  It's like beating the dog for taking a crap in the house 2 days after you've cleaned it up.  The pooch doesn't understand why you're beating him.

Most criminals don't seriously consider criminal penalties for what they're doing because they figure they won't be caught.  As an aside, most criminals(esp those who are caught) have seriously broken probability assessment abilities.

[KD5NRH]

If you can trust them in those conditions why are we locking them up in 'prison'?

To keep them under tighter scrutiny than normal society would tolerate until they gain needed skills and prove themselves capable of and willing to function in society.  If they victimize each other, that's less objectionable than turning them loose to victimize anyone else.

[Balog]

What's the saying?  "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."

Consider mental illness - people unable to cope, self destructive behaviors, inability to get along in society, etc...  How well does that fit with criminals?

If you define everything you find objectionable or sub-optimal as "mental illness" then yes I agree all criminals are mentally ill. In the real world that doesn't define mental illness that way, it's just an excuse for their actions.

edit: Which do you want to do more: punish criminals, or make so they stop doing crimes?  Because we've pretty much proven the former doesn't work.  It's like beating the dog for taking a crap in the house 2 days after you've cleaned it up.  The pooch doesn't understand why you're beating him.

Most criminals don't seriously consider criminal penalties for what they're doing because they figure they won't be caught.  As an aside, most criminals(esp those who are caught) have seriously broken probability assessment abilities.

Fix the ones you can, deter the ones you can't. I agree that the prison system now is not a deterrent, it's a combination gym, technical school, and networking opportunity. Personally I favor corporal punishment for most crimes, as well as a sharp reduction in what is considered criminal. Shame and pain are universal and universally understood motivators.

I'm not opposed to trying the Scandinavian model, I just recognize that many (most?) of the actual dangerous criminals cannot be reformed. And that unless societal changes happen there will be more and more unredeemable savages being produced.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Why do I say that?

Be cause my contact with folks like that is less academic than yours.
One thing oft forgotten when the do gooders start fantasizing about their lil plans is that while the low supervision sounds great at Starbucks or over chai at the ashram in reality many are not house broke and one needs always remember that the crime they are doing time for May or May not be the crime you need to worry about. It's often just what they got caught for or plead down to


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[roo_ster]

Firethorn:

Your posts reveal both a mechanistic view of society along with a plastic view of human nature.  All you need to come into view of the killing fields(1) is political power and a little frustration when folk don't act as you would expect them.



(1) Or guillotine, or ovens, or the gulag or...

[Firethorn]

If you define everything you find objectionable or sub-optimal as "mental illness" then yes I agree all criminals are mentally ill. In the real world that doesn't define mental illness that way, it's just an excuse for their actions.

Of course, I didn't say that - merely that 'most' crimes are an 'outgrowth' of mental illness.  IE it's a symptom.  And 'define everything you find objectionable or sub-optimal' is going WAY beyond defining criminal activity as such.  There's a lot that I consider such that I don't consider criminal.  Stupid, yes, but not criminal.

I'm with you on having a sharp reduction in what's considered criminal, so it takes some serious anti-social behavior to trigger criminal penalties. 

Consider it less an excuse(with the intent of getting out of punishment) and an explanation.  You're sick mentally and a danger to others, therefore we're going to contain you and treat you until that's fixed.

Fix the ones you can, deter the ones you can't.

I'd say deter the ones you can, fix as many of the offenders as practical, contain those you can't fix.

Prison is a deterrent - to the non-criminals.  It doesn't have to be 'nice' to not deter criminals(plenty of nasty prisons in other countries are still full), same as it doesn't have to be 'bad' to deter most of the possible criminals.

As for the level of offense up against what they were convicted for - that's why I said assess them when they show up.  That's a whole person type thing.  They probably wouldn't catch a serial killer who's in for burglary because they caught him breaking into a house, not killing anybody, but that should be fairly rare.

I'm not opposed to trying the Scandinavian model, I just recognize that many (most?) of the actual dangerous criminals cannot be reformed. And that unless societal changes happen there will be more and more unredeemable savages being produced.

That's a fairly rare category though.  'Most' can be redeemed with the proper effort.  Heck, how many drug cases are clogging up our prisons?  There have been plenty of success stories with the most hardened gang members.  Under the Scandinavian model these types are declared insane then kept in confinement for the protection of society.  At that point, because they're considered insane and too dangerous to be released outside, punishment goes by the wayside(they're crazy/broken, no sense mistreating them) in favor of containment.

Firethorn:

Your posts reveal both a mechanistic view of society along with a plastic view of human nature.  All you need to come into view of the killing fields(1) is political power and a little frustration when folk don't act as you would expect them.

(1) Or guillotine, or ovens, or the gulag or...

Huh...  I know I'm mechanistic(I'm skewed very far into 'logical'), but I think I've built acknowledgement of failure into my posts.  IE going from 60% recidivism down to 30% - that implies that 30% are still going to offend again, but this is better than 60% offending again.

To put it bluntly:  I believe that individual humans are unique and unpredictable in many ways.  However, you can make very accurate predictions when you examine humans in large numbers.

Also, note that I'm not getting into details for the reform process - that would have to be tailored to the individual prisoner.  I'm not qualified to do that.

[vaskidmark]

A goodly percentage of criminals stop going back to prison only because they "age out" and end up with effectively life sentences.  The amount of energy perceived to need to go straight is more than some want to expend.  Had a guy in a therapy group who, even after seeing that he spent 6 more hours per day hustling to come up with barely 2/3 of what I was making said "It takes too much out of me to be square."  (I was being paid $8.96/hr for that job.)

Someone needs to spend some time visiting the multi-generational criminal "families".  They may not be many in number but they are quite literally feral packs where the "return" to the wild happened at least three generations ago, and as many as seven (7).  I've done the paperwork on 3 generations all in one prison, and the 4th waiting to turn 16 so they could be transferred from juvie to the same prison as the rest of the family.  I've also talked to kids in foster care whose goal was to make it to prison - it would show they were "real players".

Even if you could get past all that, what are you going to do about the ingrained "ex-felon is bad" culture?  Some folks that want to habilitate/rehabilitate are blocked from doing that.  Hate the sin, love the sinner does not extend too far into our society.

stay safe.

[BlueStarLizzard]

...

I find it odd that no one has acknowledged that this article talks about the two types of prisons. I assume that the men in the nicer situations both want to be there and want to be free and do right when they are released. I also assume that the ones who can't be trusted or don't want to reform stay in the second set of prisons that are discussed.

Inspiring the prisoners to be angry at themselves for what they have done as opposed to being mad at the system is the key.
How many prisoners in our jails are cock sure that they were oppressed and abused by the powers that be? and, sad to even have to ask, how many actually were screwed by our system?

We have people in jail for stupid crap. We have people in jail for mental illness and substance abuse. We have people in jail because being a thug is "cool" and being screwed by the system (and it doesn't matter if they actually were or not) makes them a victim, not a criminal.

You naysayers are all snorting and stomping like bulls, without even thinking about this at all.

You think a psychological answer is only for mental illness. It's not. The psychology of American prisons does not work. It doesn't work for anyone, not the tax payers, not the guards and other workers and not the prisoners.

I'd much rather spend the bucks on making sure the criminals who WILL be released are functional in the real world, rather than commit yet another crime (and making yet another victim) and go right back to jail (stopping at court first for another taxpayer funded circus)
The guys who raped and murdered their way into life sentences, I could care less about. Throw 'em in a hole and let them rot, but most the prisoners aren't those guys. They do get out eventually and I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to see that we're all better served if they are functional members of society when they do.