Turns out the secret of Norway’s success is to put a bunch of people driving too fast in prison and also deport 1/4th of their prison population every year.
That article seems to focus on recidivism rate, not incarceration rate or crime rate. But still your point is interesting and I decided to check. I compared the Wikipedia tables for incarceration rate and intentional homicide rate (the most objective proxy for crime rate that I can think of). It turns out if I sort countries by the ratio between the two, both Norway and the US are in the middle of the pack. Moreover, it seems there’s no relation between these variables: the scatter plot looks like just a bunch of random points.
EDIT: thinking more about this, it’s much more complex. Incarceration rate probably depends both on crime rate and on society’s tolerance for crime (hidden variable), and crime rate probably depends both on incarceration rate and on society’s custom for crime (hidden variable). So there are feedback mechanisms in both directions, with hidden variables that vary by country. Maybe someone can make a clear conclusion from this, but not me.
I was thinking the recidivism rate shows that the US’s criminal justice system isn’t really an outlier in terms of the effectiveness (people seem to re-offend at similar rates to other countries).
Although the lack of a difference does seem to indicate that unless we’re going to go full-Singapore, what remains of capital punishment in the US doesn’t seem to be helping.
The US has a high incarceration rate largely because we have so much crime, not because our criminal justice system is particularly punitive.
This article is a pretty interesting comparison of the US and supposedly-more-rehabilative systems like Norway’s: https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabilitative
Turns out the secret of Norway’s success is to put a bunch of people driving too fast in prison and also deport 1/4th of their prison population every year.
That article seems to focus on recidivism rate, not incarceration rate or crime rate. But still your point is interesting and I decided to check. I compared the Wikipedia tables for incarceration rate and intentional homicide rate (the most objective proxy for crime rate that I can think of). It turns out if I sort countries by the ratio between the two, both Norway and the US are in the middle of the pack. Moreover, it seems there’s no relation between these variables: the scatter plot looks like just a bunch of random points.
EDIT: thinking more about this, it’s much more complex. Incarceration rate probably depends both on crime rate and on society’s tolerance for crime (hidden variable), and crime rate probably depends both on incarceration rate and on society’s custom for crime (hidden variable). So there are feedback mechanisms in both directions, with hidden variables that vary by country. Maybe someone can make a clear conclusion from this, but not me.
I was thinking the recidivism rate shows that the US’s criminal justice system isn’t really an outlier in terms of the effectiveness (people seem to re-offend at similar rates to other countries).
Although the lack of a difference does seem to indicate that unless we’re going to go full-Singapore, what remains of capital punishment in the US doesn’t seem to be helping.