Norway doesn't really have a permanent criminal class, and the main aim of the criminal justice system is to keep it that way. Whereas the US (and many others) have an enormous criminal social class, firmly-rooted criminal organizations seemingly in a prepetual state of war with law enforcement, and so on. That stuff isn't going away even if you did liberal prison reform. The circumstances are very different, maybe it's appropriate that the aims and methods of law enforcement are too?
They're not going away without doing liberal prison reform either.
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I honestly don't see how much good can come of the current setup. Maybe that say more about me than it does about the setup - but what good can come from brutalising these people?
When you try to use pain to make someone comply, the underlying message is that when they start complying the pain will stop. But ex-cons are effectively black-listed from most respectable jobs, they generally have very little by way of life skills, their social network is generally tied to criminals, there's no real welfare system to speak of to support them.
The pain doesn't sound like it really stops, changes intensity maybe. Meanwhile there's lots of relatively easy money to be made from drugs, slavery and the like.... I suspect you need a very strong character to work your way up decently from that sort of starting position - I just don't see how effectively torturing people would give them that.
