currently, the american judicial/penal system seems to have the opposite effect. I dare say a underlying factor has to do with prisons being profit-driven, which is essentially a incentive for them to not rehabilitate inmates (cause then they wouldn't have repeat "customers"!)
you say yourself that it's different in Scandinavia. Why is it so? the culture is different, sure, but not THAT different. We do have criminal gangs here, though to a lesser extent to be sure. how come?
I suggest the reason to be that rehabilitation of criminal works, whereas incarceration does not. There is some data to support this idea, albeit not enough to be conclusive. it would certainly be very interesting to see such trails carried out with american inmates in any scale.
And so I think what is the difference there is the million dollar question. And the worst part is that it's not even consistent with nations themselves. For instance in checking out some recidivism rate data [1] it turns out that we have things like a recidivism rate of 23% in Oregon while it's 61% in Minnesota. That datum runs also runs in stark contrast to the person who responded while projecting his prejudiced views. Minnesota demographics [2]. Oregon demographics [3]. On the gang issue, to reemphasize I think that's a product of this sort of culture rather than this sort of culture being a product of gangs. So gangs are a subset but not the issue in and of themselves.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/
[2] https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in...
[3] https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in...
A huge issue in this realm is halfway houses largely operate without much oversight and often fail to actually provide structure and support for inmates and end up being just a place to dump them. I recall one researcher who visited many saying "we are paying for them to watch Jerry Springer."
Halfway houses cost less and have similar recidivism rates.
> The US is relatively unique in that we have a relatively large population of individuals that seem to resist all efforts at stopping them from engaging in crime.
What "population of individuals" are you talking about?
> This is not really a problem in places like Scandinavia.
Why do you think this isn't a problem in places like Scandinavia? What is different about Scandinavia?
> In my opinion the major problem is once a culture develops around criminality it becomes practically impossible to detach the criminality from the culture, as resisting reform becomes part of the culture.
What is an example of a culture which is attached to criminality?
> But the issue is that we're not part of this culture, and to understand why things the way they are you really have to live through it. In that culture prison is just a regular part of what we'd call 'real life' so this sort of loss minimization calculus simply does not exist.
What culture are you talking about? Which people are part of this culture?
Your comment clearly has a point of view which stated plainly would make it hard to defend. Dog-whistling.