Right, but it's all indirect costs, paid in diffuse ways by various entities (insurance companies, often), whereas a politician suggesting raising taxes to help prisoners is a direct cost that taxpayers are loathe to pay.
Which isn't to say you're wrong, but it'd be a long campaign to change the cultural framing in a way that allowed these kinds of reforms to take place. Until then, people will be looking at that top-line Norway $100K per prisoner and shaking their heads.
"Officers are trained for 2 to 3 years before being sent to work" seems like a good one to start with, as does the skills building to prepare them for the outside.
It perks my ears up a bit when I never see that mentioned because it would likely balloon the 4x price difference between the two prison systems.
Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.)
Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.