Do you think punishment is an ineffective deterrent?
Now obviously, I'll fully acknowledge that it's not completely apples to apples; there almost certainly a million differences between the US and Scandinavia that contribute to differences in crime statistics, but I think it does demonstrate that reducing emphasis on punishment doesn't turn the world into this post apocalyptic dystopia.
> More than 60 people died in shootings last year in Sweden, the highest figure on record.
This may be a lot of people for Sweden (~0.5 death per ~100K people); it's not a lot of people in the general sense. Per [1], 19,000 people died from gun homicides in the US in the same year (5 per 100K people). Not exactly a sign that Sweden's system is failing relative to the US.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/sweden-shooting-explosion-deadlie...
[1] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/cdc-provisional-data-gun-s...
Anyway, bringing up Scandinavia as one unit doesn't work anymore when there's such a big difference between Sweden and for example Norway where restorative justice is still successful.
How sure are you of that? It's easy to get lost in the weeds, but looking at similar timelines and similar definitions of what constitutes recidivism, the US compares favorably to Sweden [0].
Worth noting is that the data is very noisy. You'd expect that recidivism would be monotonically increasing with years post-conviction, but it varies quite a bit year by year so this is not what the statistics show. This noise also makes it pretty easy to cherry pick numbers to suit your argument.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/nio-av-tio-gangkriminella...
90% recidivism rate. Scandinavia is not a success story anymore.