Re:In Norway, a Prison Built on Second Chances
by techdragon on Sunday May 31, 2015 @01:37PM
(#9634852)
State legislature is unlikely to go "soft on crime". Just look at how Pot legislation always comes from citizen driven campaigns and not from the elected officials. They acquiesce when the population demands change but enact none on their own.
Re:In Norway, a Prison Built on Second Chances
by andreyf on Sunday May 31, 2015 @02:38PM
(#9635050)
Could it be a prisoner's dilemma of sorts between states? If one state introduces prisons along the lines of those described in the article, then criminals will flock to that state because it'll be known as the one that has nice prisons.
If criminals picked jurisdictions based on criminal justice systems, presumably there would have been pretty much no crime in places like Maricopa County, Arizona under "Sherrif Joe", but as it happens criminals rarely appear to weigh the impact of getting caught very much.
Re:In Norway, a Prison Built on Second Chances
by andreyf on Monday June 01, 2015 @01:26PM
(#9640458)
I'm not saying all criminals do, but enough might, especially if there is a drastic difference in punishment / rehabilitation.
Consider the opposing stick argument instead of the carrot; from what I've heard TX and LA and MS and AZ are no fun at all, yet that seems to have little impact on the figures.
Do you actually, like, really believe that?! That’s absurd.
I mean, ok, as a political idea that can be powerful but I don’t see it having anything at all to do with the truth. It’s just absurd …
The US consists of 50 states, a substantial majority of which have fewer people than Norway. In other words there already is a convenient delineation to use for separate systems; and there already are state-level penal systems.
For the handful of states where the population is more than twice as big or so, there are easy regional separations you could make.
These kind of problems are easy to scale because they partition trivially if there are aspects of the system that does not benefit from scale.
Now you also make the argument it makes it easier to fund these programs in a smaller more homogeneous population. If you mean that getting political agreement to funding is easier, that may be a point. But then the problem is not emulating it, but lack of will to emulate it.