Worth noting that rates don't necessarily tell the whole story. In some countries you will avoid prison entirely for a whole range of offences including even some "heavy" things. It's not impossible that in countries like Norway or Denmark, people who are in prison are already statistically part of the people less likely to be rehabilitated.

On the other hand, prisons entirely create problems they're supposedly there to solve. Just ask people who've gone through juvenile detention if it's not a breeding ground to make some contacts and learn the ropes..

You'd almost need a compound unit like (reconviction rate at x years) * (prison population/total population) in order to figure out what is going on, with the idea that you'd want both reconvictions and proportion of population in prison to be low numbers.

For reference, the US has 655 prisoners per 100k, Norway has 60 per 100k.

It's generally higher than that depending on the data you use too. Most statistics you see are based on 1-2 year recidivism rates, so if they end up in prison at a later date then that's not included. For example, the UK keeps data of up to 9 years. It increases from 46% to 78% during that time period, so really almost 4 in 5 people return to crime.

Another thing to note is some base it on reconviction, instead of reimprosonment, which obfuscate the data again.

A decent summary of some research done in 2020 in recidivism rates: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...

As someone who grew up around serious criminals, this number is far lower than what you’d see in North America and shows that Norway at least makes some progress.

X/5 convicts return to crime because it is all they know and their peer group, family, and professional network are all infected by crime and their childhoods were marked by abuse, neglect, drugs, stress, anxiety, and isolation from healthy and stable human relationships. Good, well to do people like to pretend they are better than the lower classes but seriously undervalue their own good luck.

You can give an exconvict a bath, haircut, and paper degree all you want but at the end of the day the average citizen will still see them as scum and irreversibly damaged. Good luck finding a good job as a minority or (to a lesser degree) otherwise with any kind of record. The truth is that the punishment for a crime doesn’t end with one’s first stint in prison but continues for life.

Criminals are made far more often than they are born and the system is too quick to affirm the idea that they are little better than animals. No surprise to me that many return to crime.