[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.