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by MarkMc 2543 days ago
Norway also has the world’s lowest recidivism rate at 20 percent, while America sees 75 percent of its prisoners re-offend within five years of release. [0]

It's interesting that in the U.S. many people champion the power of incentives to produce goods and services efficiently yet are blind to the perverse incentives of having privately-run prisons. Of course a corporation whose profit comes from running prisons does not want to reduce the recidivism rate.

[0] https://www.encartele.net/2018/04/what-can-us-correctional-f...

3 comments

20% is still higher than I expected for Norway’s system, but I suppose there’s tons of factors contributing to recidivism.

There’s so many possible avenues a person could take to commit crimes that send them to jail. I think it’s worth using prison as a way to psychologically investigate what lead people to crime or recidivism, and try to understand crime from micro and macro levels more. Like some kind of criminal science retrospective that goes beyond solving a crime, and also provides a meta post-crime analysis. Of course, this isn’t perfect either and probably will receive privacy and medical qualms, but I also don’t know of a definitive answer about what a realistic hope is to reach for concerning criminal justice. As far as human history goes back, there has always been crime and it has always sucked.

Do state run prisons have lower rates?
Puritan ethics based on punishment rather than rehabilitation and problem solving.