

Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment - tintin
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1384308/Norways-controversial-cushy-prison-experiment--catch-UK.html

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hugh3
I think the present emphasis on prisons as solely a form of rehabilitation is
misguided. Prisons should be primarily about punishment.

What do I mean by that? Well, the urge to get revenge is an extremely strong
part of the human psyche. We really _want_ to see that those who wrong us wind
up suffering for what they do. If someone wrongs us, our first instinct on the
caveman level is to go over to his house and kill him.

Now, all this private killing tends to cause major problems in society if
everybody is trying to individually punish everyone who wrongs 'em, so we
outsource the whole "revenge" thing to the government, who sets up a criminal
justice system to determine who _actually_ deserves to be punished and then
punishes them. You steal my bike, you go to prison and suffer, my bloodlust is
satisfied, everything is cool. I don't have to kill you, which means your
brother doesn't have to kill me, which means my brother doesn't have to kill
him, and society is a much better place.

Now, in order for all this to work, we need the "revenge is bad and
uncivilized" meme. This is the meme that discourages us from taking private
revenge against people and tells us we should really just take it to the
police. And that's fine and dandy, except some people seem to have generalized
this from "private revenge is bad" to "all revenge is bad", and have started
claiming that the justice system shouldn't be about revenge or punishment
either.

I've gone on a bit already, but my main point is that the primary goal of the
criminal justice system should be the satisfaction of the natural revenge-
desire of crime victims, not necessarily the absolute minimization of the
crime rate.

edit: Also, surely there's some fundamentally funky statistics going on with
the "lowest reoffending rate" thing? Presumably prisoners are not assigned to
this prison at random -- only the least problematic prisoners are allowed to
go there.

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microarchitect
_Well, the urge to get revenge is an extremely strong part of the human
psyche. We really want to see that those who wrong us wind up suffering for
what they do._

This rather pessimistic assertion (which to me is reminiscent of Christian
dogma) needs some backing up.

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giardini
Revenge is found across all cultures, e.g., see Jared Diamond's New Yorker
article "Vengeance is Ours":

<http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/war/diamond-vengeance.pdf>

It has nothing to do with Christian dogma. In fact as the OP asserts, most
religions/social systems attempt to control the individual's desire for
vengeance.

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nodata
I'm not sure the timing of this article is appropriate. Relevant yes,
appropriate no.

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Natsu
Look at the source: it's from the Daily Mail. I'm surprised that's not an
autokilled domain, frankly.

~~~
nodata
Yet look at the comments there - these aren't your standard Daily Mail
responses. I'm confused.

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mozinator
There is a good documentary about it for Dutch speaking people
<http://beta.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1094994>

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mattraibert
You can't compare Bastoy's reoffense rate directly to that of a traditional
prison. Prisoners have to apply to Bastoy and get kicked out if they break the
rules.

