On the other hand I always assumed it's due to short-term thinking and incentives misalignment. Incarceration is a quick way to quarantine criminals and fill the need for justice of the offended. A person who ends up in prison (especially the high-security one) is likely to be away for many, many years - at which point what happens when they're released is someone else's problem. Humans are good at dealing with distant consequences in the abstract, but extremely poor at it in practice. So prisons are what they are by default.
Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").
The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.
> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.
If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with?
A number of years ago around 2006 I read a story of a man in his 60s that went into a bank, handed a teller a note to not be scared, put some cash in a bag, and that he won't hurt her. She complied, and he sat on the floor and waited for police to arrive. He wanted to go to prison and was committing a felony because he couldn't find a job, social security wasn't enough, he couldn't qualify for disability, he couldn't afford healthcare, and he had run out of options for housing now that the bank had foreclosed on his house.
Something is wrong when people are finding the idea of an institution meant to punish people a better life than living in our "free" society that people keep insisting is the best country in the history of the world.
> If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with?
Of course! Which makes the whole thing even more difficult, because now instead of dealing with issues in isolation, you have to untangle the complex web of interdependencies.
The "easiest" fix to this issue would be fixing education. If it's generally easy/inexpensive to get a good education for every citizen (e.g. via a taxation based social contract) that particular incentive goes away. Different societies have different positions on this. I'm generally very much in the "less government please" camp but for certain areas where there's a potential for multiplier effects or where more equality of opportunity is very likely to have a positive effect on society as a whole (education, health, justice, possibly defense etc.) I don't mind tax-based measures to provide more equality.
Norway is an extreme monoculture with low population sitting on oil reserves. They have so much money per capita, they end up being fine no matter what stuff they do. It doesn't mean their "solutions" work elsewhere, especially in gang infested areas.
Nor does it mean that their ideas aren't worth considering. Sweden for instance has a much larger population, much larger land area, more natural resources (except the oil of course) and more industry. Yet they have a bigger problem with crime and concentrations of poorly integrated immigrants.
Both are Scandinavian counties with a lot of shared history and are both commonly regarded as 'monocultures' yet they have noticeably different social problems. It seems plausible that some of the differences could be traced to different government policies.
And, anyway, no one believes that you can just transplant policies, but even when you cannot just copy you can still learn.
Lastly, we don't end up being fine whatever we do; the stability of Norwegian society has a lot to do with the state of mind that led to the establishment of the oil fund that ensures that the money from the oil is not squandered (like it was in the UK). The general population is broadly supportive of this and the ideas of self reliance, individual and collective responsibility, and assistance for those in need permeate the culture here. No I don't believe it is perfect here, we still have a long way to go, and we must stay vigilant to ensure that the good that we have is preserved and the bad continually rooted out.
> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.
That particular problem seems technically easy to solve (politically is another matter, of course). Just let people volunteer to go to prison without actually committing a crime, and make sure they are informed of other options at that interview. We could use the rate at which people do this as a measure of other poverty assistance efforts, and the reasons for doing it to design new efforts.
> Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").
You can if you can arrange for the prisoners to be paid at market rate for such things -- though I not only admit, but want to emphasize that this is easier said than done.
> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.
Because heaven forbid we provide free education, vocational or otherwise. /s
EDIT: Sorry, that was snarky. But i agree with a sibling post that apparently Norway is doing alright with their approach. I'd rather see someone going to prison as a failing of society, and consider the cost of incarceration one that society should bear as a result, with the hope of re-integrating the person.
But i do understand your sentiment, i agree with the incentive misalignment.
My point was that while free education is great (and I did benefit from such in my country), you shouldn't have to commit a crime as a part of an entrance exam...
On the other hand, it can be equally traumatizing for the victim's family to see the perpetrator get off with a slap on the wrist.
We don't have to go into the extremes either way.
Also, the desire for punishment is is not about seeing the perpetrator suffer, but about paying for the damage they've done. If someone bumps your car, would you describe the desire for the guilty party to pay for the damages to be a mental illness?
Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").
The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.