American Prison System Analysis

Seven hundred and seven people for every hundred thousand people are behind bars in the United States as of twenty-twelve, compared to Norway, whose prison population is seventy-two out of a hundred thousand people (see fig.1 and 2). American prison systems need to be updated similar to the Norwegian prison system, via using taxpayer money more towards rehabilitation, retraining prison guards, or even reevaluating the goal of criminal justice, thereby providing healthier ex-convicts that give back to the economy in society.
In order to clearly understand and evaluate prisons systems, a person must comprehend the origin and basis of a prison. According to Coyle, prison is defined as “an institution for the confinement of persons who have been
The study, "The Social Costs of incarceration" is the largest study of imprisonment and return to a normal life that has ever been conducted in Europe" (Loken 1). There have been smaller unsuccessful studies due to the fact that they didn’t look at a judge’s sentencing for research. Not only that, but they also looked at recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to re-offend) (1). Norway thought outside the box and looked beyond what most people would. This makes their project far more advanced in reliability than others. Re-conviction doesn’t have to be the criminal's fault, and the government should always check itself before putting the fault on others. Going in depth, researchers surveyed the percent of inmates rejoin the working force (1). They compared “administrative data sets to data sets from the courts” and found associations with it (1). This was to collate the differences of outcomes from the same crime, but a different sentence from different judges (1). In the end, Professor Katrien Loken at the Department of Economics, University of Bergen (UiB), who was the leader of the project states, “Norwegian prison model with extensive use of [labor] training while serving time, gives surprisingly good results” (1). So, providing prisoners with the proper system of work and goals for inmates, as well as an opportunity outside of the jail cells, leads to healthier lifestyles. Miss Loken provided Norway with the most effective Prison system seen yet, and America should be following in its footsteps if it even wants a foothold in the door to social progression on handling