A couple of years ago I was hanging out with a Corrections Officer from Norway here in Krakow (a “Friend of a Friend” situation) and among other things we talked about his work, and I told him I knew nothing about Norway’s criminal justice system, but I had read a bit about Anders Behring Breivik, the fine, misunderstood gentleman who methodically slaughtered 69 Norwegian citizens back in 2011, most of them teenagers.
This is clearly a man who is seemingly in need of a bit of “rehabilitation”, but according to the C.O. I talked with (who had met Breivik while he was in custody awaiting trial, but does not work in the “prison” where he is currently held. Prison is in quotation marks because it sounded much like a Ivy Leauge college dorm suite as it was described to me) he is surprisingly enough not particularly interested in therapy or counceling, instead preferring to spend his time playing video games, masturbating to Scandanavian pornography, composing racist screeds taunting the families of his victims, masturbating to Asian pornography, filing nuisance lawsuits, masturbating to American pornography. practicing the Goosestep and masturbating to Eastern European pornography.
The good, morally enlightened taxpayers of Norway can hold their collective heads up high!
21 to life actually. Certain categories of dangerous prisoners can have their sentences extended for 5-year intervals indefinitely, unless the board is quite convinced they are no longer a danger to other people. This was explained to all the foreign newspapers that observed the Breivik trial, including English-language handouts.
Still did not make it into any of them that I saw.
It is revenge if the victim or victims family gets to punish someone for a criminal wrong. Very few countries in the world allow that, this isn’t the Middle Ages. A judge or jury, justly determining sentence after a conviction, is not “revenge.”, it is justice.
I’m not actually sure this is a real thing. Most people probably believe released criminals deserve a chance at reintegration in society. But in the United States we have fifty different States with fifty different sets of employment laws. Employment laws in the U.S. in general are far less protective of workers rights than in Europe. In a free market, employers will want to know if their applicants are criminals. For liability reasons many will simply never hire a felon. You would need laws prohibiting employers from investigating the criminal backgrounds of applicants, and prohibiting using that criminal background in hiring decisions, to fully achieve this goal. But in the U.S. employment law is handled at both the Federal and State level and we just have nothing like this.
The biggest barrier by far to success for released prisoners is most private companies will not hire them for a large number of jobs, so they end up trapped in very unsatisfying menial work.
You should be very careful about making proclamations about what policies “lead to increases in crime”, people usually say such things to make a political point. There have been massive sociological and criminological studies of crime rates from the 70s to present day, and there is virtually no unambiguous consensus on why crime went up so much, and then down so much.
We’re never going to prohibit using the criminal background investigation in all cases, and I doubt any other countries do either - is there any country that would require a hospital to hire this nurse? Why This Texas Nurse Suspected of Killing 40 Babies Might Soon Walk Free
But there are states and cities in the US that have laws that restrict the us of criminal backgrounds in employment decisions- some simply"ban the box" while others don’t allow a criminal record check until a conditional offer of employment is made and then requires employers to consider factor such as the job-relatedness of the conviction and how far in the past it happened rather than refusing to hire based solely on the fact that there was a conviction.
What if rehabilitation is immediate? Say I were to murder someone, but under truly once-in-a-lifetime circumstances, and I would never, ever murder anyone ever again. No jail time at all, I’m free to go?
Am I allowed to murder my father’s killer, if and only if my father is the only person I would ever avenge in this way? He can’t be killed again, so I would never kill again, and therefore, any further punishment of me would be excessive and without purpose?
I do agree that there is a purpose to some minimum waiting period for decency’s sake - it would make a mockery of the justice system for someone to be released a short time after murder even if truly repentant. But I think that when courts slap on “without possibility of parole”, it’s often just a way of ducking the issue of rehabilitation and washing the review issue off of their hands.
Yet its pretty common to hear people complain that prisoners have it too easy, that they get heating, feeding, medical care etc They will also say that prisoners should all be doing hard labour, and those are just the milder end of the comments that folk make about prisoners.
When prisoners are released they usually end up having to go into local authority housing, and you’ll hear many folk complain that this should not happen and that other folk are far more deserving of limited housing resources.
When former offenders are seeking employment and disclose their record when required - their chances of a successful application are done.
I completely understand the wariness of former prisoners, but rehabilitation needs a whole range of support services in the community, but these are either non-existant or underfunded - no real surprise because there are so many other more deserving priorities.
There is a difference between justice and revenge and I appreciate victims often do want revenge. I see offenders getting off relatively lightly compared to the devastating impacts of their offending on their victims, and I think that the perception of light sentencing and lack of support for victims feeds into a desire for some sort of retribution.
In the absence of an effective offender management system in the UK, I have noticed that the main reason criminals give it up is simply time, they just get fed up of the lifestyle and all the hassle of lost family and interrupted lives, and this has very little to do with any active policy of the state as such, its more of a byproduct of the system.
Perhaps you can argue that prison sentences are too short and maybe offenders should be retained until they have aged somewhat - I have no issue with that,
in fact
…the one prison sentence that really does serve as a deterrent is the one called Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) When an offender is given one of these, they have a minimum tariff set and they will only be released after that time once they have proven themselves to be minimal risk to the public. This means they have to very much behave themselves, not get involved in various prison sub-cultures, comply with rules, and complete all the behavior and education programs that are contained in their sentence plan. I have come across many offenders who know that if they are convicted of further offences of violence or against the person then they will be put on IPP sentences. If the offender misbehaves at all or breaches any conditions of their licence upon release then they are returned to prison - and this will hang over them for decades - they do not have to be convicted of further offences to be returned to prison. Believe me when I tell you that this concentrates the mind of the offender remarkably. Unfortunately it takes a lot of management, it also puts people in prison without time limit and make the management of the prison place estate quite difficult and expensive - you will not be surprised to know that this type of sentence is being dropped - yet it is the only one that I have found that prisoners truly fear.
Personally I would extend this to all prisoners convicted of multiple offences on multiple occasions - the ones who you would call the ‘revolving door’ offenders
We can look are offending rates and struggle to come up with reasons, or at least understand the data fully, however it is compellingly striking that the education levels of prisoners is woefully inadequate - why those levels of academic attainment are so poor is another debate but it is striking. It seems to hint at lack of development not just in education but in social and empathic skills.
Some courses have been put in place to address those issues but places are limited, the courses are expensive and there is not enough follow up post release. The offenders who do those specific programs tend to have lower reoffending rates but there is hot debate s to why this is the case - such as cherry picking those who are accepted on to those courses.
One thing you will find in almost all the studies on reoffending - and I have read many of them - is that family support is a significant indicator of resettlement success - so you would maybe imagine that resources would be put into supporting offenders families, unfortunately this is not the case.
but when parole advocates argue that they behaved themselves in prison, well… maybe because opportunities to commit crimes, such as stealing will result in inmate punishment, no children to molest, etc.