Re:Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others
by owlninja on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:33AM
(#30082149)
Can you shed some light on rehabilitation in Australian prisons?
Re:Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others
by skissane on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:12AM
(#30083378)
I don’t really know. My uneducated impression is that Australia’s prisons are harsher than those of many Western/Northern European countries but not as bad as those of the US-but I don’t know of any hard data on the issue. Rehabilitation is officially an objective and of course the prison system makes some attempts but we can always question if they do enough.
The US inherited the basics of its legal system from that of England. Australia did too, along with many other countries. So at a very high level, the basics are the same. But, there has been a lot of divergent evolution, so as we drill down into the details lots of differences come up.
I think one huge difference is not really legal but social – Australia has always been a less violent society, with less violent crime and less social conflict than the US has, which reduces political pressure for punitiveness in the legal system. On a per capita basis, the US homicide rate is 5 times that of Australia, and while these numbers go up and down, I think it has been consistently significantly higher than Australia's, for many decades.