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.