Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub
That said I am not so sure it would work the same way in the multicultural…poorer US.
Norway is multicultural. The terrorist was supposedly motivated primarily by "resistance" to multiculturalism.
One jurisdiction in the capital city in fact has a majority population of Middle Eastern and African (mostly Somali) immigrants, and it's been a major source of tension for a number of years that the rate of immigration is too high for those from fairly different cultures due to a nearly open border as regards refugees and asylum. By contrast, I couldn't possibly consider someone not from the EU or Australia, since anyone from outside those countries would never get a visa that would permit getting to know one another and seeing if it could work. There's plenty of people in the US that want to move here, but can't get a visa unless they have an exclusive skillset and an employer willing to do all the paperwork to show they really need that person. Even then, it's hard to get someone in here that could integrate easily.
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I do believe that Norway’s standard of living and social structure makes a big difference in crime.
Certainly. But the converse relationship also exists. If you are aggressive in pursuing criminals, you get poorer people and the poor become more desperate. If you rehabilitate and reintegrate criminals, you get more taxes and poor people get back on their feet a lot easier. Overall, it helps the poor communities to increase their wealth, whereas the current system moves wealth to states that have invested heavily in prison capacity (prisons create jobs for people that are already middle class).
An average Norwegian will make a net lifetime contribution of USD 4 million to the gross domestic product. If half their life were spent in jail, we would be losing USD 2 million worth of GDP while paying to keep them in prison. In the USA, you also end up with the fiscal district of origin paying money to the fiscal district of incarceration, as well as losing jobs to there. It makes the poor even poorer, and not just the person that is incarcerated. As well as taking the potential productivity of a criminal out of the loop, converting them into a net loss for society as a whole, a loss that is disporportionately borne by the already disadvantaged.
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But…it would be worth a try.
Encouraging words.
It would be a bit of a departure from the usual standard of equal justice to have a trial area that works differently from other areas, and something of a risk in terms of people coming there from elsewhere to get opportunities they otherwise might not have. On the former point, it should be tolerable in that different states already have different standards of justice, just as nations do. Also, there is a simple solution to the latter point, which is to limit the trial population to the permanent residents of the area.
You would probably need a private sponsor to try it out, but the basic idea is simple enough: introduce a system whereby one has a suspended sentence of the difference between the trial area and the rest of the country, and where sentences are dimensioned in porportionality to what they are now (keep the priorities, basically), while the prisons have a higher standard of living and the final part of a sentence is served in a facility that is focused on rehabilitation (for instance, our best facility is an ecological farm that is a completely self sustained ecology, and the prisoners work there with small shared apartments as well as duties and responsibilities, later on being allowed to spend some time in the general population each day- an ankle bracelet tracks them if they try to escape). Set up a cooperation with local corporation for one year subsidized wages for employees from the rehab program and keep those that have good retention. Have some skill training options. That sort of thing.
Along the way, you need rational management since you don't have the same history, meaning that you'll need to define objective, measurable metrics of how you're doing, and constantly evaluate the different factors in the programme to figure out what works and what doesn't. The idea is long term improvement by refining the methodology to accomplish the goal of lower crime, lower recidivism and lower total cost to the community in the long term. Because of differences in culture and so forth, this is crucial, as just copying what we have isn't going to work unless it's deployed over the whole country and given decades to work. You need strong support for the programme, or a strong sponsor (Bill Gates comes to mind), so that you can try it for an extended period before making a final recommendation. Lessons learned can be shared with the rest of the country in open reports. Ideally, the revamping should have the police heavily on board so methodology can develop in cooperation between units. If, at the end of a preset minimum trial period, the programme has failed to effect an improvement, then you cancel it and the suspended sentences are retained (maybe unsuspend them for serious crime with a high risk of recidivism when there's no evidence of reduced risk).
If someone does have a sponsor in mind, I would be happy to assist in rolling out such a programme, having a fresh perspective and an aptitude for thinking on my feet outside the box and adapting to conditions. More likely, though, one will choose to go with someone having experience or an established name. Just throwing it out there in case someone with the right contacts were to think it a good idea.
Regardless, I think it would be good to push for politicians to have a go at an experiment in reform. Without trying, you'll never get to see if it can work for you or not, meaning you would never get to realize the benefits if it does work. Of course, it wouldn't be as easy over there, since the baseline poverty is higher (and, just to make a point, most of the Taliban are Pashtun, which is a poor group of people in Afghanistan, treated and regarded much like black people a few decades back in the USA). Prisons contribute to society if run properly, though, and reduce poverty or at least slow it down. Run the wrong way, they accelerate poverty.
So, yeah, get your politicians to try science for once. A hypothesis is tested. Objective observables are measured. Adjustments are made to isolate what factors matter and what factors don't, to do more of what does work and less of what doesn't. That's what has worked in every field of human endeavour so far, and it's a shame not to apply it elsewhere. And I think we can say the hypothesis is more sound than a lot of what is taken as outright fact in US politics these days. You'll probably get less resistance to the idea in a liberal-leaning or left-leaning area, but it would be best to try several areas. Get a feel for what the real factors are and how to make shit work.
Not expecting you to be the one to go out and do it, but I would appreciate if you discuss the idea with friends and family.
Raise awareness of alternatives; it might one day lead to improvement.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: What gentle people you Norwegians must be. - 
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