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Comment by hackermailman | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprisingly people who have done long stretches of time in Norway's prison system disagree with this article. Only a few prisoners enjoy the freedom of this island, which is equivalent to a trustee camp in a US min security prison. The rest who were given 10+ year sentences are in complete isolation in what the media loves to refer to as hotel prisons. In these cells everything is provided for you including your own shower, therefore there's no reasons for the guards to ever let you out and you stay in there 23hrs per day. Because the media calls them hotels, it prevents any prisoner from being able to complain and be taken seriously, so often these guys will either light their cells on fire and hopefully get transferred to one of the older style jails so they can talk to other inmates, or they just kill themselves.

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Do you have a source where we can read more? Everything I'm finding is an article gushing about how humane Norway's prisons are. I keep finding headlines like "Twice as many suicides in Norwegian prisons" from The Norway Post, but their site won't actually load for me, and the Google cache on those results looks like it's probably their homepage.

I wasn't able to find a lot, but I did find this: https://www.kriminalvarden.se/globalassets/publikationer/for...

That claims that the suicide rate per 100k in norway is 127. According to this:

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=194

The US had around 20 in the same timeframe. Apparently local jails are worse, at around 40-50:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/04/why-jails-have...

So what I've found so far seems to back you up: We're looking at Norway being something like an order of magnitude worse when it comes to prisons. But I'd like to find better data.

Norway also exports prisoners to the Netherlands to serve time as they are at capacity in some facilities. Renting a foreign countries' prison is not mentioned by the media over here touting the Norwegian system.

My source is primarily from anecdotes of friends I knew arrested in Oslo who spent long periods of isolation during pretrial and were told by other prisoners which jails to avoid getting transfered to, all of which are the new prisons because they are extreme in isolation. There's some other anecdotes here comparing old style jails to Bergen "luxury" prison https://youtu.be/iA1L2kg3wRw and here https://youtu.be/iWhdzIJMEmQ talking about Norway's most hated man Anders Breivik who like everybody else assumed life in a Norwegian prison would be easy until they experienced the reality of solitary confinement. Even worse, because Breivik sued and won a lawsuit against the prison for isolation an appeals court was forced to overturn that decision because he is Breivik and a terrorist monster so there was political pressure to do so, and this means the top court in Norway has officially ruled that solitary confinement does not violate the prisoner's human rights.

There's also papers in journals around about disabled minimum security prisoners in Norway being forced into isolation in these new prisons as the trustee camps and old jails can't accommodate them, of which I can't find immediately.

Anders Breivik isn't the best case for setting a precedence, as far as I could read the ruling was grounded in the fact that he was dangerous and that other prisoners would be a danger to him.

Obviously, that case has particularities that do not transfer to other cases. Such as the man being universally hated.

But it is true, that Norwegian prison system isn't perfect. And unnecessary pretrial isolation justified as restricting contact to outside conspirators is not uncommon.

All that said, Norway is the still the best place start your criminal career :)

> Anders Breivik isn't the best case for setting a precedence, as far as I could read the ruling was grounded in the fact that he was dangerous and that other prisoners would be a danger to him.

Norway has civil law rather than common law - doesn't this mean that this decision doesn't work as precedent, as that's only really seen in common law?

> Norway has civil law rather than common law - doesn't this mean that this decision doesn't work as precedent, as that's only really seen in common law?

Precedent exists in civil law systems also. The difference is that in civil law systems precedent is generally seen as persuasive rather than binding, and lower-level judges have greater freedom to disregard precedent than in common law systems. That said, I think the difference between common law and civil law systems is a matter of degree rather than a stark boundary. Even when they aren't formally speaking bound by precedent, lower civil law courts will tend to respect the past rulings of the higher courts and apply them–no judge likes being overturned on appeal. And, in common law systems, not all precedents are binding, some are merely persuasive; and there is the procedure of "distinguishing" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing – which enables judges to justify not following a precedent even while still formally affirming it as binding.

Isn't that basically solitary confinement, which is deemed a violation of the UN convention against torture? I was under the impression from the numerous articles that there are plenty of common rooms, kitchens, workshops, and other activities for inmates in those prisons.

Also, could you please provide a source for your statement that "Unsurprisingly people who have done long stretches of time in Norway's prison system disagree with this article?"

Solitary is very popular in the Scandinavian prison systems. It is even used extensively pretrial, for long periods of time. This is often forgotten when talking about the lenient Scandinavian prisons.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/42150580/PSS...

The rest who were given 10+ year sentences are in complete isolation

I think you'll have to provide sources for that. Edit: actually I think you are completely wrong. Extraordinary claims etc etc.

There's only one prisoner I know of that gets this treatment and it is ABB. (BTW: He should have been found insane and sentenced to mandatory therapy. Would still end up locked up but 1. he would hate it and 2. we would have a chance of actually restoring his sanity: )

Edit: read just recently that how prisoners pee or spit in the food of certain inmates and how these same inmates have to pay for protection.

Can you explain how this works if they are locked up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day?

sending them to an island sound like micro-exile. I think that would be a way to fix overpopulation, create an island devoid of much and get the prisoners to make it more habitable in preparation for the general population.

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