Health Care, Education, and Ecological Prisons - Why Norway thinks it can work

[mur'phon]

Wow. I'm glad I read that. I really makes me want to stay very, very far away from Norway. Good to know that a guy can slaughter city blocks worth of people and get thrown in prison for 21 years for it. That makes me feel REAL good. And he'll be treated nicely, not like the piece of human trash he is. I'm sure Ted Kaczynski would love Norway

 

Not correct. While 21 years is the maximum you can be sentenced to, you can be held for 4 years ekstra at a time if you are considered a threat to society. This can go on forever, and the decision is made by crime psykologists, other medical staff and a judge.

And you would be given a room with a bed and a tv, priveliges would be granted/removed acording to behavior. You would also offered education, though if you refuse, you would most likely have to work.

Sure, compared to american prissoners he would be treated like a king, different ways to look at a criminal I guess.

 

I did hear they had a high suicide rate...

 

True, it seems that in a society where "everyone" is sucsessful, being not so sucsessfull can be quite hard

[True_Avery]

Wow. I'm glad I read that. I really makes me want to stay very, very far away from Norway. Good to know that a guy can slaughter city blocks worth of people and get thrown in prison for 21 years for it. That makes me feel REAL good. And he'll be treated nicely, not like the piece of human trash he is. I'm sure Ted Kaczynski would love Norway.

I fail to see how treating someone who is screwed up and probably stressed to all hell like a monster helps them or society in any way. America and other parts of the world just throw them away and lock the key, and when those people eventually get out, innocent or not, they have a high chance of coming out of our system worse than they were before hand. 6 million inmates more than any other country on the planet speaks for itself.

 

Maybe the lesson is to not treat people like monsters, but to treat people like people for a change. Taking someone who probably had a terrible childhood, stressed out life, emotional problems, etc and making them feel like humans, like they may actually be worth something instead of instantly calling them a sinner unable to function ever again who may as well be put to death.

 

It is extremely easy to call someone human trash and throw them away, opposed to taking the hard way and using time to try and heal someone and help them becoming a functioning member of society once again. We have such a revenge and "punish the sinner" attitude towards other people, but in my opinion that makes us just as bad as the sinners we so love to hate.

 

And if you had paid attention to the video and links, the inmates still express that they still feel like they are living in a prison, that they are still being watched. This is not a free lunch ticket. It is punishment, but instead of a filth filled corner where you are regularly beaten and raped by your fellow inmates, you are helped along to recovery.

 

I may not have any real idea how this works, but I had a familiar problem in Middle School. During all of Elementary School and Middle School I was an emotional mess. I would regularly snap and attack people making fun of me, unable to control my anger. I would get easily frustrated and give up, usually breaking down into tears, leading to terrible grades. My teachers liked me, but I could see that I was an unneeded distraction to the rest of the learning system.

 

By Middle School I could no longer control myself. I would simply break down mid class and run away, hiding in some remote corner of the school for hours at a time. The meetings eventually started between my teachers and my parents, and the school system recommended I transfer to a local mental facility/school to be taught there instead. My parents objected and asked for testing to see my state of mind. By the end of the 2 month testing, the school ran the numbers and found they could not chart my intelligence because it was too high for my age level, but they could also obviously see that I was emotionally unstable.

 

They still recommended the mental facility, but my parents objected and found a "Special education" class in my middle school. This class was not for the mentally retarded (pardon my use of the word for lack of better), but for the unstable. For people who could not function in normal classes due to emotional problems, social problems, etc. For the next 3 years I stayed in there with one of the best teachers I have ever had the honor to have. She helped me control myself, helped me feel normal, and over time I became more and more stable, and by the end I could function pretty normally from then all the way to now.

 

In that class I learned more about the facility, as some of the students eventually had to go there. You were watched, helped, but any emotional outburst could have you pinned to the wall or ground, locked in a closet till you calmed down, or even tied to your chair during the day to keep you from moving.

 

My point? The school saw me as a problem for them, so they wanted to send me away to some facility to easily fix the problem. When we fought back, I was able to get the help I needed from a set of teachers willing to put their time and effort into helping me. Sure, it may be a poor example, but taking the easy way and simply throwing someone away can hurt more than it helps.

 

Not correct. While 21 years is the maximum you can be sentenced to, you can be held for 4 years extra at a time if you are considered a threat to society. This can go on forever, and the decision is made by crime psykologists, other medical staff and a judge.

And you would be given a room with a bed and a tv, privileges would be granted/removed according to behavior. You would also offered education, though if you refuse, you would most likely have to work.

Sure, compared to American prisoners he would be treated like a king, different ways to look at a criminal I guess.

Thanks for clearing that up. I think that system works better than saying "life sentence" and never looking at the person again. Hiding a problem and ignoring it is a lot different than trying to solve it as a society and system in my opinion. A countries skeletons have the habit of popping out of the closet now and then to say hi.

 

Of course I did hear they had a high suicide rate... Not sure on that one.

True, but depends on your definition of suicide. Some outright kill themselves quickly, other drown themselves in drugs and/or alcohol to slowly die. Americans have a track record for the second, but there are indeed many parts of the world were suicide is becoming a large problem. China and Japan for a start.

 

Right. Norway, because of it's socialist system, doesn't have any mass-murderers. Somehow, I doubt that.

There are murderers everywhere. And countries punish them accordingly. But, remember, not everybody in prison is a mass murderer. Many of them are repeatedly caught drug abusers/sellers. Some of them did something stupid, like steal, and got caught doing it.

 

250,000+ people murdered per year in the United States by guns alone, meaning the United States has the largest death rate by homicide per year than any current country on the planet. Norway has the lowest of any country, meaning they have the lowest murder and crime rate. There have been points that America is a melting pot of race and belief, but that just shows are how ignorant we are towards others. Canada has roughly 100-250 murders per year, their lowest on record being 50.

 

So, does socialism make a country safer? Meh, problem not and it is probably based more on how we treat each other as a people. But, something is wrong with those numbers, and we can only go on for so long before our prison system finally overloads and we have no room for all these people we keep tossing away. Norway and Canada may not be 100% peaceful, but having the label of one of the lowest crime rates of any other country compared to the exact opposite, America, means they have to be doing something right. And if nothing can be applied to America to make if safer, then, perhaps, the idea of a country that is basically a cultural mixing pot was an absolutely terrible idea in the first place.

 

I could look at you right now and see a "murderer". People may not kill people directly, but some beliefs put people behind bars for the rest of their natural life, which is simply another way of outright killing someone. If you are going to do that, at least have the balls to put a gun to their head to free up room and lower the absolutely massive amount of tax dollars that go into our 7 million inmates.

 

And you may send them away for 10 years saying "That'll fix them up good", but in that 10 years they learn the trade, they are stuck in an incredibly violent atmosphere, some are beaten, raped, and even more outright killed by other inmates. That sounds like hell to me. And if I remember correctly from many Religions, ultimate punishment and hell are up to God. You throw them in there, most of the time you are sentencing them to death, or you directly are hurting the people that inmate will harm with his new found violent behavior when he leaves prison.

 

Not to say Prison does not make people think back and change, but if some of the people are capable of being changed by that hell on earth, then I think so many more can change if you actually treat them like human beings instead of a stain on your perfect society. Still, in the end, there would still be people completely incapable of functioning in society even if that were to be put into effect... but I doubt the number would be anywhere close to 7 million.

 

Not trying to be mean at all to anybody, just throwing out stuff.

[Tommycat]

Well I keep forgetting to mention that our prisons, are not all dirty rat infested holes people see in movies. Many of our prisons are quite reasonable. Of course then there's Sherrif Joe's idea of "Tent City" where the offenders are placed in a tent in the Arizona heat, and made to wear pink underware. Rape and beatings are very uncommon in Tent City, and many of the inmates there are allowed to work their regular jobs. Then there are the work release programs that allow inmates elsewhere to still keep their jobs, but they return to jail every night. It is quite obvious that most people who debate about how we treat our prisoners generally haven't been to nor worked at a prison. I currently have a friend of my wife's serving life in prison. He knows what he did was wrong, and in fact turned himself in. He pled guilty, and says that prison life isn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be in movies and TV.

 

They have a code in there. Raping a child will get you repeatedly raped with various objects, and you are likely going to die. Thievery, probably nothing. Murder a child, and you'll be lucky to survive a week.

 

I know more, but mainly because I've been inside. Most of your time is spent in your cell. You read, go to bed, wake up, excercise, eat breakfast, excercise, go back to your cell, read, excercise, read, eat lunch, excercise, read, write letters, read, count the blocks in your cell wall, daydream of getting out, eat dinner, read, excercise, read, go to bed. That was how my whole sentence pretty much was. I didn't come out a hardened criminal. I am not a greater menace to society than when I went in. Such is the falacy of the people who believe they really know what happens inside the walls of prison.

 

Nice dodge there re the suicides. Killing yourself slowly is not the same thing because of the intent. Killing yourself intentionally with an OD is the same thing. It really doesn't matter, as I don't even know if what I heard about the suicide rate there being higher than average is even true. It may be completely off base, I haven't checked for myself.

[mur'phon]

Right. Norway, because of it's socialist system, doesn't have any mass-murderers. Somehow, I doubt that.

 

It isn't necesary the system, though I think sharing the oil with the population has helped. Norway has the cash to make everyone well enough off, thereby making "everyone" middle class. So yes, I think the socialist system did help Norway, but it's a speciall case.

 

Of course there are a lot of factors that dosen't really have anything to do with socialism, but might have helped: like the low amount of imigrants (around 10%), the way criminals are treated, a high level of education, small cities (the largest has around 500 000), low access to guns and little drug abuse.

[PoiuyWired]

mass murderer are special cases. I am sure that most people in a prison are not mass murderer. In fact, many of them are in it for much less dangerous reasons.

 

While I have no problem with locking it up and throwing the key away for some of the extremely vile and deadly individuals (or execution for that matter, even as I am usually opposed to it) I do think that most of the inmates have the ability to be reintegrated into the society given enough help.