Interesting column by Izzy Kalman at Mercator.net (h/t Tipsy) about American versus Scandinavian reactions to bad behavior and how it affects our anti-bullying efforts.
The basic idea is that our anti-bullying efforts mirror our respective approaches to criminal justice and juvenile delinquency. America has a more retributive approach whereas Norway has a more rehabilitative approach.
So why were his results so much better than those in America? The answer may just lie in the discrepancy between the way Scandinavia and America deal with criminals, as revealed in the aftermath of July 22.
Scandinavia comprises what are probably the most socially just countries in the world, with Norway possibly at the top of the list. Its low crime rate and high standard of living are the envy of the world. No wonder Middle Easterners want to live there despite the cold weather! It brings warring peoples to the peace table in Oslo. It steadfastly champions the underdog. Its neighbour Sweden tries to encourage world harmony by giving out Noble Peace Prizes. In the uncut version of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, we are shown a Norwegian prison for violent criminals. But it looks like an island paradise. The guards do not carry guns and are indistinguishable from the inmates. The prisoners engage in gardening and other productive activities. The staff treat them like decent human beings in the expectation that that’s what they’ll become. And, as a result of their humanistic treatment, the recidivism rate of Norwegian criminals is far lower than that of the US.
Why does Norway limit prison terms to twenty-one years? Because it wants to save people, not destroy them. Imagine you are a murderer. For the coming two decades you will be confined to a place where you are treated with dignity despite your actions. The people in charge care about you and believe that your essential nature is good. Are you not likely to come out a very different-and better-person?
Now, I know there are plenty around here who would say that Norway is just different; such molly-coddling would never work in America. Perhaps they’d point to differences surrounding multi-culturalism, for example. But, knowing my fellow countrymen as I do, I don’t think the humane approach would be embraced even if it could be shown conclusively to result in significantly lower crime.
Retribution is justice! And, here’s the dirty secret: it feels better. It is more personally gratifying to get back at those who have wronged you than to turn the other cheek. It is emotionally difficult to watch a wrongdoer being treated nicely, even if that kind treatment results in the individual no longer doing wrong. Besides, we’re all just sinners in the hands of an angry God anyway; worms condemned to hell but for the grace given to an elect few. Why should we treat the evil among us with more compassion than our Creator dispenses to the non-elect?
“Retribution is justice! And, here’s the dirty secret: it feels better. It is more personally gratifying to get back at those who have wronged you than to turn the other cheek.”
Does it really? I know we often live as if it does, and we demand “closure” (which sometimes seems to demand killing the S.O.B.), but does a dead S.O.B. really bring “closure”?
I know I’m fairly unlikely to encounter in your comboxes people insisting “Thus saith the Lord,” but should any happen along, bear in mind:
(1) The Old Testament had 18 capital crimes. Killing someone for most of them would strike all but the most hardened Christian Reconstructionist as barbaric.
(2) The USA (or Indiana, or Illinois, or …) is not God’s Chosen People (I’m unlikely also to encounter anyone here who’s shocked by that), and the historic Christian view of the Old Testament doesn’t seem to recommend its penal code.
(3) The Old Testament arguably required 2 eyewitnesses, and one of the 18 capital offenses was perjury in a capital case, whereas we’ve put a heckuva lot of factually innocent people on death row – including putting them there with perjury.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” is both more applicable to inhabitants of Christendom today than are the 18 capital offenses, and that the literal meaning of that prayer makes me shudder whenever some aggrieved family member looks the TV camera “in the eye” outside the courtroom and pronounces sentence *on himself* by vowing “I will never forgive….”
In the longer term, don’t think retributive justice feels better at all. But, it’s a quick hit like booze or chips as compared to exercise or veggies.
On the religious side of things, culturally, the United States seems to draw a lot from Calvinists and Puritans. Maybe I’m wrong, but I get the sense that they took the Old Testament closer to heart than the New.
While I’m generally sympathetic to Scandinavian ideas of crime and punishment (although I, like many Norwegians, do think that there ought to be special provisions for mass murderers), I don’t really believe that this would have any effect on the US crime rate.
It’s important to keep a couple of things in mind when looking at American crime rates in comparison to those of Europe. The first is that US crime rates have, at least from the beginning of the 20th century, *always* been substantially higher than those in Europe. In the 30’s and 40’s, the murder rate in the US was approximately 10 times higher than the murder rate in the UK, despite the fact that the penalties were about the same in both countries. Compelling evidence of the efficacy of the Scandinavian model would be evidence that the crime rate in Scandinavia dropped from US levels to much lower levels after the introduction of penal reforms. But in fact the rates have always been lower. (Specifically, the murder rate in the US is 5 per 100,000; the murder rate in most of Western Europe is about 1 per 100,000).
Another issue that has to be considered is the fact that the US violent crime rate is at a historically low point now. The murder rate has fallen to half of what it was in the 70’s and 80’s (9.7/100,000), and is about the same as it was in 1960 (5.1/100,000). Again, I’m not a fan of the addiction to incarceration…but I can’t pretend that keeping (some) convicts locked up for longer has not prevented some crimes.
Another issue is that crime rates vary widely by state in the US, with some states approaching European levels of crime (N. Hampshire: 1.1/100k; Utah: 1.5/100k; MN: 2.1/100k), and other states doing much worse (LA: 12.7/100k). And crime rates are much higher in larger cities: (N. Orleans: 64/100k; Kansas City: 47/100k; St. Paul: 6.5/100k).
But it’s not the case that the penal system in MN or NH is radically different from the penal system in Missouri or LA. And of course to the extent you want to suggest ways to lower the US crime rate, the best approach would be to consider why Mass. has a murder rate of 2.6/100k (despite the presence of Boston and other urban areas), which is almost half the US average. As opposed to skipping that step and comparing the entire US with Norway, with a much different history and population.
I’ve read several studies on crime rate comparisons, and the best explanation I’ve seen (and I forget whose theory it originally was) is simply that Americans, culturally, think that more people deserve to be killed. This is reflected in the US support for the death penalty, I think…and reflected in the sense that it reflects an underlying sentiment in the population. You can see this clearly if you look at individual states: MN, MA, and NH have very low murder rates, but also do not have the death penalty (NH does, technically, but hasn’t used it since 1976). Southern states, which tend to have the highest murder rates, also have the greatest support for the death penalty.
But the “deserving killing” theory is most commonly seen in actual murders, where arguments, insults, or behavior that in some parts of the country, or the world, would result in nothing worse than a fight, would result in a murder in many parts of the US.
There is a connected theory that the higher murder rate in the south is connected with the south having a stronger cultural idea of “honor” and the appropriate response to insults – this can be tied into the “dueling culture” of the 19th century.
Anyway, to wrap things up, while I philosophically like the Scandinavian penal system, I don’t think that it will have much effect on the US crime rate at all. What we need is a culture that doesn’t see violence as a good way to solve interpersonal disputes. The goal is to reduce murders and violence; how we subsequently treat the murderers doesn’t bear much on that goal.
I’d suggest that the “honor”/violence connection has some relation to adolescent emotional satisfaction.
I have an assignment for you, Doug. Remember my map of ethnicity in the US by county? There were a couple of counties where Norwegians were the largest ethnicity.
What is the crime rate in those counties? What is the average life expectancy? What is the average income.
I will be you $100 that those counties all exceed those measurements in Norway.
You simply can’t compare multiethnic, sprawling countries like the US to homogeneous, minuscule countries like Norway.
I always like to use statistics that disaggregate ethnicity, because African-Americans are such outliers with respect to crime and income, they skew things a lot. It doesn’t hurt to disaggregate Hispanics as well, since so many are immigrants. Comparisons of non-Hispanic whites to Norwegians is a much fairer comparison.