Does Prison Work?

[Stavros]

This article from The Guardian poses an important question about prison. Read about Sweden, and ask why do other countries do the opposite of what they do in Sweden and have bulging prison populations, when Sweden seems to have it cracked?

Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets

Decline partly put down to strong focus on rehabilitation and more lenient sentences for some offences



Richard Orange in Malmö
The Guardian Monday 11 November 2013 16.33 GM
Prison numbers in Sweden, which have been falling by around 1% a year since 2004, dropped by 6% between 2011 and 2012 and are expected to do the same again both this year and next year.


Sweden has experienced such a sharp fall in the number of prison admissions in the past two years that it has decided to close down four prisons and a remand centre.
"We have seen an out-of-the-ordinary decline in the number of inmates," said Nils Öberg, the head of Sweden's prison and probation services. "Now we have the opportunity to close down a part of our infrastructure that we don't need at this point of time."
Prison numbers in Sweden, which have been falling by around 1% a year since 2004, dropped by 6% between 2011 and 2012 and are expected to do the same again both this year and next, Öberg said.
As a result, the prison service has this year closed down prisons in the towns of Åby, Håja, Båtshagen, and Kristianstad, two of which will probably be sold and two of which will be passed for temporary use to other government authorities.
Öberg said that while nobody knew for sure why prison numbers had dropped so steeply, he hoped that Sweden's liberal prison approach, with its strong focus on rehabilitating prisoners, had played a part.
"We certainly hope that the efforts we invest in rehabilitation and preventing relapse of crime has had an impact, but we don't think that this could explain the entire drop of 6%," he said.
In the opinion piece in Sweden's DN newspaper in which he announced the closures, Öberg said that Sweden needed to work even harder on rehabilitating prisoners, doing more to help them once they had returned to society.
One partial explanation for the sudden drop in admissions may be that Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drug offences following a ruling of the country's supreme court in 2011. According to Öberg, there were about 200 fewer people serving sentences for drug offences in Sweden last March than a year previously.
Sweden's prison services will retain the option to reopen two of the closed prisons should the number of inmates rise.
"We are not at the point of concluding that this is a long-term trend and that this is a change in paradigm," Öberg said. "What we are certain of is that the pressure on the criminal justice system has dropped markedly in recent years."
Hanns von Hofer, a criminology professor at Stockholm University, said that much of the fall in prison numbers could be attributed to a recent shift in policy towards probationary sanctions instead of short prison sentences for minor thefts, drugs offences and violent crimes.
Of the fall in prison population between 2004 and 2012, he pointed out, 36% related to theft, 25% to drugs offences and 12% to violent crimes.
According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million.
How the rest of the world compares with Sweden

According to data collected by the International Centre for Prison Studies, the five countries with the highest prison population are the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India.
The US has a prison population of 2,239,751, equivalent to 716 people per 100,000. China ranks second with 1,640,000 people behind bars, or 121 people per 100,000, while Russia's inmates are 681,600, amounting to 475 individuals per 100,000.
Brazilian prisons hold 548,003 citizens, 274 people per 100,000; finally, India's prison population amounts to 385,135, with a per capita rate of just 30 inmates per 100,000 citizens.
Among the countries with the smallest prison populations are Malta, Equatorial Guinea, Luxembourg, French Guyana and Djibouti. Sweden ranked 112th for its prison population.
• This article was amended on 12/11/13 to clarify the figures regarding theft, drug offences and violent crime.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...mates-plummets

[dderek123]

I would love to live in Sweden. Their public school system have things figured out as well.

IMHO prisons in North America only make sure that convicts aren't running around on the streets for a certain period of time. I think it's the bare minimum of how they should be rehabilitated and I hope some day that things will change for the better. A number of things in society would need to change for the current prison systems to start resembling what's happening in Sweden.

[trish]

Prison works to suppress, oppress and punish. That's the only use I can see for it. It strikes me as odd that the nation that claims to value freedom and liberty above all else, uses imprisonment as its primary tool of enforcement.

[danthepoetman]

The first element to consider is of course in here, the criminality rate. It will generally be higher in poverty and lower in relative material comfort, lower where the social tissue is tighter (even in poverty) and higher in a "nuclearisation" state, generally lower when there is a good social coverage and higher when there isn't. This all goes without saying, but such elements increases the complexity of any kind of analysis of statistics on the question. I don't know the exact situation in Sweden; I know that at some point in time, it reduced its social-democrat type of popular coverage, which was in the 70's, the most efficient and admired in the world. The "Swedish model" was studied everywhere, and I know that here in Quebec, we molded some of our institutions after it.
The social context in general is also very important. There will be more crimes in Columbia or Mexico that in Monaco, of course.

But if we exclude such very broad considerations, the main problem in my opinion is always the perspective by which incarceration takes place. If rehabilitation is the goal, you're bound to have less people in jail, to have a more lenient penal system towards first offenders in particular, but also in general, and sentencing that will arise some reflections, like more probation, home detention or community work, for instance, rather than simple incarceration. Giving possibilities to inmates to gather an education, to marry, to create a familly might also help create the conditions necessary to reduce criminal recurrance. Many countries have adopted such a perspective, and I suppose it must be the case for Sweden. When the goal is punishment, on the contrary, all you're left with are peple with no hope, purging their sentences with a vengeance and thinking of themsleves as settled up with justice when the sentence is purged, which will in turn, forced the system to be even more severe with recidivists. Moreover, in such circumstances, prisons become schools of crime, where you make contacts and learn greater criminal trades.

Another problem is the involvement of the private sector, and/or the potential gigantism of the public one. In the US, which population counts for about 5% of the world's, the carceral population counts for about 24% of the entire world carceral population! This creates a situation in which you get to have, in similarity to the mighty Militaro-Industrial Complex, what is now called a "prison-industrial complex", capable of pressuring the politics and even, it has been seen, the justice system itself (I refer you to the incredible "kids for cash" scandal of Pennsylvania, in 2008, for which I'll leave the Wiki link at bottom of my post). You easily imagine the development of a dangerously worrying potential for a lobbying of the criminal justice system, "probably" already existing in the civil justice system...

Checking out the numbers, after reading your post, Stavros, I was surprised to see that the amazing incarceration rate of the US was not always such. It started increasing during the Reagan era (I'm sure this will be surprising to every one), the great turn to the right of the late 70's early 80's and on, and with the so-called "war on drugs". I'm posting the graphics herbellow, with a few other Wiki articles relating to the topic in my eyes.




Which indicates that it's not just about 2 million incarcerations, but in fact, a total of about 7 million Americans in the criminal system.

Global prison population:
List of countries by incarceration rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prison-Industrial Complex:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison-industrial_complex

Other articles related:
Incarceration in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Youth incarceration in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kids for cash scandal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Stavros]

Dan, I have posted this link before in the past, a book which argues that the growth of the prison population in the USA has been part of the war against civil rights which explains why more Black Americans are in prison than any other social group, followed closely by Latinos. There is also the provocative film The House I live In which is a deeply depressing film about some of the worst excesses of the war on drugs and the 'three strikes and you're out'.

Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of inmates in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. In this book, Alexander argues that this system of mass incarceration "operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race." The War on Drugs, the book contends, has created "a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society." Mass incarceration, and the disabilities that come with the label "felon," serve, metaphorically, as the new Jim Crow.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: Michelle Alexander: 9781595581037: Amazon.com: Books@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41sG3gaNuZL.@@AMEPARAM@@41sG3gaNuZL

Michelle Alexander is also in this film:

[martin48]

Prison - It worked for Nelson Mandela

[dderek123]

Michelle Alexander is also in this film:

The house I live in is a great watch. It gave me a different perspective on the war on drugs.

[Stavros]

I wonder - the legalisation of narcotics might reduce the volume of violent crime, but would it remove a criminal penumbra to its manufacture and distribution? There are fairly regular stories on tv about counterfeit alcohol -some of it with the potential to cause blindness and other illnesses maybe even death- and contraband tobacco.

[Stavros]

Prison - It worked for Nelson Mandela

Cute point! Except he was not in prison for drug smuggling -I wonder how many political prisoners leave prison with a different perspective on life and the cause that landed in prison in the first place.

[dderek123]

I wonder - the legalisation of narcotics might reduce the volume of violent crime, but would it remove a criminal penumbra to its manufacture and distribution? There are fairly regular stories on tv about counterfeit alcohol -some of it with the potential to cause blindness and other illnesses maybe even death- and contraband tobacco.

Yep there are bigger fish to fry but arresting shooting fish in a barrel is easier for the justice system.