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by unhammer 4282 days ago
So the reason the Netherlands has more prisoners is because in Oslo junkies live on the streets? I don't quite follow the reasoning.
2 comments

The war on drugs is still going on in Oslo, and the human cost is evident in the human misery on the streets (and filling up the prisons). The dutch have reached a more enlightened stage in the fight against drugs, and it shows.
i'm not sure they live on the streets or not - but i think it's safe to say that the heroin problem is holland is being dealt with and in norway it's out of control - last figures i saw were 17k dutch addicts with 12k in treatment, no idea how norway stacks up though

that article says that the dutch want to close 19 prisons due to lack of prisoners, but there are not enough prisons in norway

My point was: The fact that the Netherlands has too many prisons and Norway too few compared to prison population does not entail that the amounts of prisoners are wildly different. In fact, they're pretty much the same. Norway just hasn't built as many prisons as the Netherlands.

Whether the difference in prison saturation is related to their drug policy is a completely different question. (In any case, it seems Norway is doing an about-turn wrt. rehabilitation: http://theforeigner.no/pages/columns/a-forthcoming-change-in... )

fair enough - i guess i wanted to tell people about my recent observation.