Personally, my big gripe with this is if someone was to rape, kill, or hurt someone I love - I would not want them coddled or given an easy life. I’d want them thrown into the deepest, sickest hole we could find and I’ve talked to former prison guards who say such places exist.
A second gripe is if prison is so nice, whats to keep people from choosing to just live there? Hey, it beats being homeless on the street or have to work a crappy job.
OTOH if someone I loved made a mistake I would want them treated humanely. Also I hate how many people the US has in prison and how many former prisoners end up right back in prison.
This would only be a good idea for prisoners who can still be redeemed, who are likely to repent and try to reintegrate back into society on a good-faith basis.
For prisoners who aren’t, probably not so much.
Also, in America, there is more of a visceral desire for revenge than there is in Norway, so I don’t think the U.S. public would be cool with comfy prisons.
Chances are, the US justice system would send precisely the wrong people to the wrong prisons. They would sent repentant, vulnerable prisons to dark pits of misery where they would emerge far worse than before, while sending hardened, unrepentant criminals to the comfy penthouses.
The U.S. already has prisons that are roughly similar. The minimum security federal prisons aren’t dank, dark shitholes by any measure. If they are good enough for Martha Stewart, they are good enough for me. There are also all kinds of special programs that vary by state. I have a childhood friend that was convicted of 1st degree murder in Louisiana and sentenced to life without parole. I am not sure how but he gets to work outside of the prison and only has to go back at night.
However, I don’t completely agree with the Norway model especially for hardened criminals. Prison is supposed to suck. That why it is considered punishment. I think it is ridiculous that spree killer Anders Behring Breivik that hunted down and killed 77 young people is getting the same “punishment” as people that committed much less serious crimes.
That while it is nice as prisons go, it is still a prison.
Mind you: even when prisons aren’t that nice, there are people who’d rather be in prison than outside, but that’s not so much a matter of “prison being nice” as of “the outside being crappy” (at least for those particular people).
I’ve known cases of people who did their best to get admitted to the local hospital because they liked it better than their homes. Does that mean hospitals should treat people like punching balls? I don’t think it does, but evidently your mileage may vary.
As I understand it Norway has normal prisons and they lock up troublemakers there and its where maybe all prisoners go at first. then they work to go to the easier prisons.
Considering how most prisoners, even “lifers” often get out anyways we need to have a way to bring them back into society, not to mention people who are sent to prison by mistake.
I get the sense that a very large portion of Americans don’t even care about basic humaneness of prisons.
Overcrowding? Who cares, prisoners aren’t entitled to space.
Inadequate medical care? Who cares, they’re criminals.
Abuses of authority by prison guards? Rampant violence between prisoners? Tacitly permitted rape? Who cares, who cares, who cares.
Of course, the legal system may disagree. But I’m doubtful the public is on board with where the courts are right now on these issues, nevermind improving conditions for prisoners beyond that.
I suspect criminals in the US are already hardened to much higher stakes. If you started a project with first-time offenders, you might get some real results, over time. Whether you could sustain the political will for long enough to see results I am not sure.
I think you overestimate the importance of decent-looking surroundings. And underestimate the importance of actually having a minimal amount of freedom and self-determination in your life. Such as the ability to decide what socks to wear, what to do and whom to spend time with. And the ability to occasionally meet members of the opposite sex.
Heck, we don’t even like poor people in this country. We’re definitely gonna get our pound of flesh from actual criminals. It’s no accident that politicians charge their rivals with being “soft on crime” so often.
Having a hard time getting an actual number on this (please do post if you can find it), but I’ve seen estimates between just 5-10% of all people incarcerated are never getting out again because of death penalty or life without possibility of parole.
That means 90% of prisoners are going to rejoin us out here one day. So it strikes me as monumentally stupid to treat them poorly.
Someone up-thread said prison is “supposed” to be a bad experience. First of all, I’m not sure that’s true. I think I read somewhere about somebody at least paying lip service to the concept of rehabilitation. But even presuming that’s a farce, why should incarceration be terrible apart from being separated from society? They’re going to come back out - so we’re going to treat them like animals and then expect them to readjust and behave? It makes no sense.
In 'murica, its not about justice, or fairness, or even rehabilitation. It’s more about money. If someone can make money, then it will be done. And if not, then no.
Sure, if you think the purpose of prison is punishment. In the case of a guy like Breivik, the purpose of prison is to keep him segregated from the rest of us for the rest of his life, so he can’t murder any more of us.
What happens to him in prison is irrelevant to me. He’s not going to get rehabilitated, he’s not going to learn anything from punishment, nobody out there who was planning on massacring dozens of students is going to be deterred from that course of action by learning that Breivik is suffering in prison.
So how we treat Breivik has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with us. We don’t want to give prison guards the legal power to torture prisoners, not because prisoners don’t deserve to be tortured, but because nobody should have the legal right to torture people. If we don’t want to bother to treat prisoners humanely, then we should just put a bullet in their brain and end it once and for all, torturing them doesn’t accomplish anything.