[Bjartr]

> The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.

To the best of my knowledge, one of the problems with US prisons today is that the resources and support you describe are not widely available.

[philwelch]

Yeah, and that sucks, and I'd like it to change. But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

[Bjartr]

> But I don't think turning American prisons into Norwegian-style resort hotel prisons is going to magically convince every American criminal to turn into a productive citizen.

I think you're arguing against a strawman here. I don't think most people who support moving from the current system towards a more Norwegian-style approach are arguing that it is the panacea that will reform all criminals, only that it will do a lot better that the current system.

[philwelch]

It’s not an uncommon fallacy to think that people only commit crimes because of poverty, desperation, or oppression, and that solving these problems is sufficient to stop crime. It’s also not an uncommon fallacy to think some sufficiently liberalized, rehabilitative form of incarceration would actually work for 95% of criminals. The fact that some people are just awful and need to be quarantined from society is uncomfortable, taboo, or alien to a lot of people.

Maybe this comes across to you as a straw man argument because you don’t live somewhere completely insane where there is political opposition to building jails and police stations in the first place because of wacky leftist ideology. Sometimes I envy people who assume I’m arguing with a straw man.

[InitialLastName]

I mean, presumably making it possible for them to be productive citizens would be a pretty good start.

[philwelch]

Yup, I think I covered that in the first sentence of the comment you are replying to.