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Comment by gngeal | Hacker News Reader

10 years doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

...while in Norway, you typically only get the maximum 21 years of imprisonment for multiple murders. And even that is apparently with the possibility of an early release after 14 years and unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years. And even with murder on your hands, they just might send you off to Bastøy to rehabilitate yourself properly. And somehow, the crime rate in Norway is still much lower, as are the reoffending rates.

I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

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You cannot just take a system that works some place in the world and transplant it to another, completely devoid of any cultural context associated with it. What works for Norway would probably work really well if applied to most middle-class Americans. I seriously doubt we would see much success with a system like that applied across the board - there are too many other problems keeping our recidivism rate up, such as lack of support after jail, the lucrative nature of the drug trade, the way we structure our prisons to support gang mentalities, the lack of opportunities for convicted felons, etc etc.

Since we're being honest here, if someone murdered someone close to me and then got unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years, they'd be dead in an alley their first weekend out. Maybe Norweigans are very different, culturally. Maybe I'm just a vengeful asshole who should just deal with it - but I doubt I'm alone over here. But this could also just be a reaction to violent crime - I don't feel as though most non-violent crime deserves harsh sentences. Hell, I'd settle for large fines in most cases.

> What works for Norway would probably work really well if applied to most middle-class Americans. I seriously doubt we would see much success with a system like that applied across the board

This is why the federated approach to governing was a big part of the American founding fathers literature (focusing on state-level power), which they viewed as a counter-point to the negative side-effects of centralized Monarchy systems in Europe.

The American government has been reversing it's course - centralizing law (and law enforcement) to a national level - over the last century. Making experimentation with new systems and adaptation to better systems much more difficult.

And how many years do you think you would deserve for killing him in an alley? How much less likely to kill again would you be after 10 years in prison vs 5/15/20?

'Less likely to kill again' isn't the only metric we are going for here. Some people like to assuage their own conscience by believing in rehabilitation only, but prison sentences are actually for more than that. They exist to punish as well, because otherwise the victims feel no sense of actual justice - the victim didn't matter, the only real problem here is that we now have someone who might kill again, so let's fix that and then set him on his way.

The length of this sentence is absolutely a cultural thing - perhaps some would feel that 7 years before unsupervised weekends is a fitting punishment. I can guarantee you that most Americans do not - if you want to see a rapid increase in vigilantism in the U.S., try reduced sentences for things like murder.

Oh, and I would fully expect to have the court system hit me the harshest penalty they could - they hate vigilantism. But that's irrelevant to the decision that got me there.

"In America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either."

>I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

well, theoretically you can get up to 1 year in many states, though i suspect usually it is much-much less harsh than that.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...

Life sentences for repeat offenders caught shoplifting food are last decade's news.

What is the actual re-offense rate? I've been curious about this

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