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> we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything

Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.)

Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.

> recidivism costs a lot too

Right, but it's all indirect costs, paid in diffuse ways by various entities (insurance companies, often), whereas a politician suggesting raising taxes to help prisoners is a direct cost that taxpayers are loathe to pay.

Which isn't to say you're wrong, but it'd be a long campaign to change the cultural framing in a way that allowed these kinds of reforms to take place. Until then, people will be looking at that top-line Norway $100K per prisoner and shaking their heads.

I'm not against spending more per prisoner on actual rehabilitation efforts but I am very skeptical the US would see anywhere near that improvement. The circumstances that lead to crime in the two countries are quite different and those US prisoners end up right back in those situations when they are released.

I don't doubt that the Norwegian system has other aspects / safety nets that help here, but the article says they had a 70% rate as recently as the 1990s. It would be silly not to look at that 70% -> 20% drop and at least try and learn some of the lessons from it.

"Officers are trained for 2 to 3 years before being sent to work" seems like a good one to start with, as does the skills building to prepare them for the outside.

Agreed but I have no idea if those aspects/safety nets existed in the 90s.

It perks my ears up a bit when I never see that mentioned because it would likely balloon the 4x price difference between the two prison systems.

> but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

I don't have a source for this but I thought the opposite was true? That the general consensus was we'd end up spending less because the recidivism rate would go down?

I think they mean more per prisoner per year, which is immediately measurable. It'd be done in the hope that total costs would go down over decades, but in our current political climate it's hard to sell improvements that take decades to manifest.

Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime. If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder, then why would lesser sentences deter lesser crimes?

It's always weird for me to hear arguments about death penalty not deterring crime, then in the same breath they favor life in prison over death penalty. Not even aware of their double standard.

You'll find a wide spectrum of beliefs within that "same breath".

Personally, I think life in prison is necessary in some cases - that there are people who will never be able to function safely in society - but that it is simultaneously overused (case in point: stealing four cookies; https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-19-me-12244...).

There's also the "you can release someone from life in prison" aspect if there was a mistake, malicious prosecution, or they've shown signs of genuine rehabilitation.

My opposition to the DP is based on my distrust in our justice system and the fact that a wrongly applied DP is irrevocable. Life w/o Parole lets you amend failures in our legal system.

It's a common opinion. I find this stance a bit weak, since it doesn't hold the justice system to the highest standards and expectations. I know, death seems so immediate and there is no taking it back, but things aren't usually that trivial in reality, a life in prison can also mean the person dies in prison without reparation, or even if revoked, the person might spend most their life in prison and has a few years to live free. A person on death row might have many years to prove their innocence. I guess we could also apply a statistical analysis and determine if the error margin is tolerable, sort like how we handle hundreds of deaths in traffic.

> Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime.

So you think if there was no punishment for any crime, the crime rates wouldn't skyrocket? Not sure what to say to you if you think that's true.

> If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder...

Who says it doesn't?

Deter doesn't mean prevent entirely. You can't just say "well murders still happen", that doesn't prove that there wouldn't be more murders if it had no prospective punishment.

Reductio ad absurdum, and a straw man as well. Of course if you eliminated all punishment for crimes, crime would skyrocket.

I think that long sentences are counterproductive and expensive, both in terms of societal expense and in how we treat people. The US would be wise to wean itself off the nipple of hatred and revenge that feeds our punitive "correctional system."

And it doesn't take much googling to find the answer to your final question. The majority of murders are committed in anger, because of mental illness, under the influence of drugs/alcohol etc. Few murders are committed by people planning rationally in cold blood, weighing the pros and cons.

Do I think some people deserve to be locked up for life? Yup. The man who murdered my niece and two others in a fit of drunken rage should never be allowed to walk freely in society. In the state where he committed his crimes, the DP was an option, but I'm glad it wasn't imposed. Having the DP on the books sure didn't deter him. And it hasn't deterred proven to be a deterrent in states that have it as law; homicide rates are higher in states with the DP than those without.

I have family in LE. In the justice system. Colleagues who work in the FBI and DoJ. Coworkers who were COs in prison. None of them think what we're doing is effective, either for less serious offenders or the most heinous prisoners. We either put them in a SHU, give them the needle or throw them to the wolves in Gen Pop. Prisons have become our toxic waste dumps.

> rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing

Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.

So where's the math in that? It makes absolutely no sense that entirely quantitative prison sentencing is at best qualitatively determined and completely devoid of metric tracking, everywhere on Earth. wtf is this.