After describing Norway’s luxurious prisons and short prison sentences, Will Wilkinson suggests that we should consider making our justice system more like Norway’s in order to bring down our murder rate:
Norway has one of the world’s lowest murder rates. America is worst in the developed world. Maybe we could learn something. Perhaps we should wonder why our detention facilities aren’t more like Halden [a Norwegian prison]….
All evidence supports the proposition that Norway’s criminal justice system is both practically and morally superior to America’s. If America’s abominably cruel and unjust system delivered results even remotely comparable to Norway’s enviable level of civil peace and order, then there might be some reason to take seriously American animadversions against Norway’s short sentences and humane prison.
Wilkinson should teach this lesson to the Dutch: if only they stopped building dykes all over their country, maybe they wouldn’t need to worry so much about flooding! After all, we Americans are far less aggressive with our dyke-building, and we don’t have nearly the level of flood anxiety that they have.
So true. I think it has to do with the underlying culture. For better and worse, our culture is more violent than Norway’s. I read once about a study (sorry, I can’t seem to locate it now) comparing violent crime rates in Japan with those of the Japanese community abroad in Peru and Brazil. While Latin America, as a whole, has an extremely high violent crime rate, that of the Japanese community there is comparable to the rates in their homeland.
Yes. The silly thing with Wilkinson’s argument is that it would be such an incredible stretch to suggest some kind of underlying causal relationship between our high murder rate and the relative (to Norway) unpleasantness of our prisons. Sure there’s a “correlation” (which, with 2 datapoints, really isn’t that), but by what mechanism would our prisons be the actual agent causing the murders?
He thinks Norway is gentler and more respectful of it’s people so people want to behave better.