Sweden eyes sending inmates abroad as prisons full due to gang crime wave | Hacker News Reader

Sweden eyes sending inmates abroad as prisons full due to gang crime wave

reuters.com

59 pointsimpish920853 comments

This has been a no-brainer for like a decade but the previous social-democratic government resisted for the fear of bad optics.

The cost of housing one criminal in a Swedish prison is $342/day.

This is like 4x the average EU cost, or something similarly crazy.

Arbitrage is trivially feasible.

Could be worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island

> In a 2021 analysis by the New York City Comptroller, it costs the city approximately $556,539 to detain one person for one year at Rikers Island.

$1,524.76/day/person. Makes you wonder where the money went. Obviously paying the guard salaries and whatnot adds up, but that's luxury midtown Manhattan hotel room prices for every single inmate. It would be cheaper to hire three people for every single inmate to personally stay with them in 8 hour shifts to make sure they don't get into trouble.

That's just straight-up corruption.

Plus there should be some sort of economies of scale in a large prison…

Makes me wonder if it would be reasonable to pay the prisoners that much to be normal healthy members of society.

I know I'd be on my goodie two shoes if I was getting paid $550k a year. Makes me feel like the people who sabotaged my career are just trying to murder me.

You are so close (you being America). Yes. Just pay for a high quality education to tertiary level and beyond for everyone. It would be much cheaper and crime would plummet.

This is why we need a push for radical transparency when it comes to public spending.

What did they spend $556,539 per inmate on, exactly?

Taxpayers deserve an itemized receipt.

Otherwise, by accepting overspending as the norm, it obfuscates corruption & large-scale grift as taxpayers get fleeced.

There's also substantial opportunity cost - that's $500K+ that could be going toward education or useful public services, that ended up in someone's pockets instead.

Transparency invites accountability.

Completely ignorant about how it works but I wonder if medical costs come into play here? Those can get rather sizeable rather quickly in the American for-profit healthcare system.

Can't imagine most prisoners have good insurance but I could be completely wrong here.

NYC economics is fascinating - but not really an inspiration.

Something is off about that number. They have a population of 10,000 and an operating budget of 1.3 billion. It can't cost them half a million per inmate.

"Costs the city" and "costs the prison" are not the same thing.

Yep: the comptroller's estimates include all-in cost to the city, including health care for the city's imprisoned population. Given that Rikers acts as an asylum of last resort, the medical costs of the imprisoned population are likely not insignificant.

Pension costs for the guards are probably also a thing.

Here’s the underlying source: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-co...

It’s still not very clear in breaking down the cost, but I suspect it has to do with increasing amounts of violent incidents and related tort claims. That increase is a broader pattern across the NYC Department of Corrections, with per capita assaults on staff quintupling over 10 years:

https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correc...

Interesting. That’s pretty high but I guess not surprising. It’s sort of like paying cost of a hotel room and meals and also prison staff. On the other hand, it’s not that much more than what cities like SF or Seattle spend on each homeless person that their programs cover.

Unrelated, and I am asking this seriously: isn’t outsourcing imprisonment how the present nation of Australia (excluding indigenous people) got populated?

Denmark curiously doesn’t have this issue, thanks to moderate and sensible immigration policy.

Denmark only closed their doors after Sweden did. Before that, you just pointed - go north for more monies.

This is why Sweden doesn't really love Denmark as much as we used to. (Yes, it's more complex, but this is one aspect.)

Before that, you screwed us when we merged our two national postal services into a single company, PostNord. You know what you did.

Simply move all the problematic people to Malmö and then give them Skåne back. Make Skåne Danish again!

It's not a haha situation.

I know. It is even sort of tragic. The old Czech cohort of political dissenters who escaped from Czechoslovakia to Sweden back in the 1970s mostly described Swedish immigration policies as suicidal and the resulting drop in public safety as shocking, but less shocking than the persistent denial to which the political class stuck until the mid 2010s.

Yup.

majority of the scandanavian crime wave isnt due to immigration but drug dealing native biker gangs

Lots of data to show these gangs are not composed of Swedes. We are past the point of pretending the problem wasn’t caused by immigration.

These criminal biker gangs are now like 70% non-European immigrants. (Turns out they are not that racist, after all?)

depends on the gang. the older gangs refuse to accept non-natives, so the newer gangs enroaching on their turf do.

It seems perhaps that the liberal democracy approach to immigration policies is now dangerous to the survival of democratic institutions. Maybe all countries should deport illegal immigrants, and severely limit immigration for a period of time by only allowing immigration for study or work. Asylum immigrations shouldn’t be allowed at all.

I sincerely hope you're never in a situation where you have to flee your country of citizenship, but if you are, you'll know then how cruel this sentiment is.

The ease and availability of asylum immigration has ruined the culture of many countries worldwide. People used to die fighting for the value system they wanted to create in their country, and now they just flee, and the end result is that many countries have turned into despotic and corrupt regimes. Meanwhile, those who gain asylum are often indoctrinated by agendas which make them resentful of the very countries protecting them. I understand the fear impulse, and the need to protect yourself and your loved ones. But I also know I am not someone who would like to flee.

That said, I think cooler heads need to prevail out of all of this because it seems to me that there is a lot of effort being put into using cultural heterogeneity for destabilizing democratic societies. Democracies need to devise safeguards against such machinations, and relying simply on race or religion will not be enough.

Huh you know it's bad when even a fairly liberal place like HN is considering the root cause to be "unsustainable" immigration (used as catch-all term).

Immigration without effective and demonstrable integration does seem to be problematic.

I think the issue is more countries should recognise that different people and cultures are different and be selective as to who they want to let in. Sweden letting in Finnish PhD candidates would probably cause less issues than letting illiterate Somali gang members or whoever the current lot of prisoners are. We went through a weird phase of saying it's racist to say that.

I don't know if integration is necessarily that important. I was a Brit in the boom days of Hong Kong when the Brits ran it and mostly the Brits did their thing and the Chinese did theirs separately but it was mutually beneficial which is what counted, kinda.

The concept of integration is also a joke. 99.99% of people that grew up south of the 50th parallel north cannot and do not want to integrate to swedish society.

The same way 99.99% of swedes cannot and do not want to integrate to a southern country.

Isn't this what Britain did to New South Wales sending prisoners to colony populating it all with convicts?

Sure, but in an era where starving to death and stealing a loaf of bread qualified for transportation. Anyone convicted of anything particularly nasty just got the death penalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code

One result of which was that NSW had such a corrupt police force they needed to bring in a British cop to remove rot from the top (~30 years ago). Recently, the NSW state government is openly corrupt with no fear of oversight as their own 'independent' anti-corruption body is toothless and disinterested in clear video evidence. You can accurately consider NSW as being a few steps away from outright third world cash-for-service bureaucracy. It has become a selfish take-what-you-can culture, and a real tragedy of the commons seems to be unfolding. The government is effectively failing.

Yes, once the colonies the other side of the Atlantic were no longer available for the purpose.

> Yes, once the colonies the other side of the Atlantic were no longer available for the purpose.

I hate to say it, but, the ice started melting in Antarctica. /s

North Atlantic Ocean.

The prisoners sent to the pre-USofA British (and other) colonies.

WOW! This is off the scale. Sweden. Sweden went from a place that was not famous for anything, some kind of mind your own business, nothing to see here country, got some snow, some logs,meatballs, and a bit of good steel, gracious and hospitable in an incomprehensable language, to ?,a stuffed solid mega profit prison system economy? and crime wave gangs? How asleap at the switch are the Swedes anyway? zackly how do you get from the one place to the other? And that they are contemplating, doubling down, on the distopian planing that got them here is a societal suicide note. A fully non acountable private, international, prison system, that gets paid by automatic withdrawl from national budgets, administered by lawyers, who get to hide behind jargon, and privacy laws. Once started, it will never end, it will be part of the dark site, abu guantonimo, network, its taint will infect every part of society, as try as you might, exporting all of your contradictions is impossible.

Norway did that for a while when there was a surge in prison population. I think they sent prisoners to the Netherlands.

Of late the Dutch were thinking of sending prisoners to Estonia.

I thought they used Hellfjord. /jk

I hate to think that prison should be harsher but if you had to go to prison somewhere, Sweden looks to be the most comfortable place to serve your time.

Don’t commit crime = No such problem!

Swedish politicians are so worried about optics that they become paralyzed by indecision. Not only that, political correctness (and to some extent wokeism), is so deep that it is often impossible to talk about certain subjects. It took more than 15 years for Swedish citizens and political parties (excluding SD) to talk about immigration without being labeled as a Nazi or racist. It will take +15 years before any action will taken regarding Sweden's domestic terrorism (it is terrorism).

// Swedish person

Does Sweden have a definition for "extent wokeism," or is it just a term idiots like to throw around because they don't understand issues, like in the US?

Demanding a “definition” of “woke” just invites pointless debate about semantics. Nobody insists you define “neocon” or “conservative” or “far right.”

Who is “woke?” In the context of discussions about immigration, it’s folks who have difficulty talking about the subject without conceptualizing it in terms of “racism” or “xenophobia.”

Ok cool so you can't define it either. Maybe we should stop flinging around a nebulous term that means absolutely nothing until someone can define it in any way, shape, or form.

You'll find plenty of definitions if you google the term[1]. If you would like a more long form explanation I recommend reading what Paul Graham[2] wrote about it. But to quickly answer your question, being woke means being extremely political correct, to the point where it is just a performance. Paul defined it clearly:

> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

But don't focus on the word "woke" in my comment.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke

2. https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

It's a pretty good definition if for some reason you think Paul Graham is in a position to decide what's "performative".

How about sending them to Rwanda?

Just convert the accommodation created for refugees to prisons?

this isn't really about gangs

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