Sweden Is Closing Many Prisons Due to Lack of Prisoners

reply to post by Maxmars


This article is not 100% true picture of the criminal climate in Sweden from my point of view. If the Swedish police and social service where doing what they should do their statistics would be very different. In Sweden there is a lot of under 18 age punks that go around robbing and violently attack people of all ages who use the we are to young to be punished defense and when you have gotten a few cases dismissed by the Swedish Police without action you do not care anymore to report small burglaries or assaults. If you do not put the criminals in jail it is not hard to have empty jails and having very short sentences helps to.

US might be to hard on the criminals (for limited drug use) but Sweden are insanely soft on real assaulting criminals and many people are pissed of at the government for it. In Sweden a burglar can get money for being bitten by the owners dog when he is robbing the place. .

reply to post by LittleByLittle


That is exactly what is happening, criminals are not being judged like they used to be. Its similar here like it is in our neighbour country Sweden that first timers have to pay small compensation and short probation. And its even worse when people who kill someone gets full time in jail( 12 years ) but gets out in 6 years and if behaving well even sooner. A guy who assisted in murder got a sentence of 6 years in prison but got out in 2. Rapists and Pedophiles serves short sentences 1-4 years which only tells us how sick this system is.

Maxmars
What do you think?

If we changed the drug laws in the United States and released or shortened the sentences of many of the people incarcerated for those laws, our prison population would also quickly shrink and become more manageable as a means of rehabilitation. That was its original purpose, after all.

Otherwise, I'm all for outsourcing prisons for our most violent and sociopathic criminals, and sending them to the depths of Siberia for pennies on the dollar.

reply to post by Lingweenie


Sweden and other Scandinavian countries usually get the highest happiness rating in the world.

The answer to this is economic equality

The more a country has acute economic disparities the more things like crime and injustice exist.

Sadly the USA has one thing that all the other nations quoted dont have.

African/Americans and Hispanics.

I understand they make up something like 90% of the US prison population.

Yes the US multicultural experiment has been a complete success.......

reply to post by Maxmars


EVERYTHING they do politically, we do the opposite.

Putting someone in jail and then just releasing them doesnt solve any problems it exacerbates them.

We are such dumb animals its unbelievable.

WE ARE STILL GROUNDING ADULTS AS PUNISHMENT WTF?

Well, that is a good thing. In the United States, on the other hand, a lot of prisons are now run by corporations, and as such, I'm sure those corporations want to keep them between 90-95% capacity, because the corporations profit off the prison system here. There is not only cheap (slave) labor to be had, but profit to be made on food in both the canteens and commissary.

@OneQuestion: I think that since the prison systems are now corporate, and Citizens United allows unlimited corporate funding into political campaigns and politics and such (I just heard about Citizens United from an interview with Jimmy Carter, I will have to read up on it to know more details) corporations are not worried about a better society in the U.S., but about profit, and if that means filling up the prisons, then by golly we are all going to be going in and out of jail from now on. And that isn't new, corporations usually put profit first.

Law enforcement agencies are now being trained to rewrite how they got information in order to make it appear as if they were following 4th amendment rules regarding requiring a warrant. And the only way to counter that is to get a good defense attorney.

Which is not working, by the way - I have a defense attorney that filed for discovery recently, and the report was entirely false, so now I have to get eye-witness testimony from reliable sources, which I do have. So to reiterate - even getting the discovery does not work, because at least in this case, the police blatantly lied on their report.

I actually just did a Google search on this because I was trying to find a source, and found a bunch of news articles instead that described the police not even bothering and just blatantly ignoring the 4th amendment in things like stop-and-frisk and random searches at sports games.

But I don't understand how come police officers, politicians and corporate leaders are not punished or held accountable when they break the law, in my opinion, a police officer or member of an intelligence agency should be punished for breaking the law just like a regular citizen, even up to the point of getting a felony, and there should be whistle-blower protection. I don't understand how the leaders of our society are not held accountable to anything in the U.S.

Is it really ethical? Are there really people out there who are thinking "Gee, you know what, if it's good for the economy, I'm all for staying in jail for a few months here and there?"

Is that what we are thinking as a country? Because that's exactly where we are headed, and I think the main problem is that people don't understand the reality of the situation - I do, I was there, I was involved. And it seems as if it is spreading to the point where everyone is going to be experiencing it.

We are talking about a situation where everyone is going to be treated like a criminal without due process, not just ignoring innocent until proven guilty, but in a lot of cases, sweeping up people who never intended to do a crime and punishing them for the crime.

Do you have a box cutter? You could have been a terrorist, therefore you get the punishment of a terrorist, that mindset, except applied a lot more broadly, is what I see coming.

The basic idea is that it is just going to be a pain, whether or not you are doing anything wrong is honestly irrelevant to whether or not you are going to be searched (by definition with things like stop-and-frisk and police checkpoints), and whether or not you get in trouble could also be entirely arbitrary - based on anything from shoddy police work, to unfortunate possession of something that could be used in a crime, even if ya don't know how.

My opinion on the matter is that it is ridiculously unethical and that there should be some standards in the legal system, but I guess that's just my point of view.

I see other people's comments on Sweden, in the U.S. though, all this fuss over arresting innocent people / not following due process isn't reducing crime as far as I can tell.

In fact, from a sociological standpoint, it could increase crime because being a criminal, now unavoidable, will become so commonplace that it's no social stigma.

Also, this idea of not differentiating between people who just happen to be carrying the wrong item and someone who has already acted on a crime using that item, that kind of mentality, it's just going to confuse people in my opinion.

gort51
Sadly the USA has one thing that all the other nations quoted dont have.

African/Americans and Hispanics.

The USA has many 'things' others nations do not have but minorities that are widely disliked or discriminated against is certainly not one of those things.

I understand they make up something like 90% of the US prison population.

It's actually 60% but i suppose that will not really mean much to you or change your perception of who creates the conditions that results in these minorities being locked up much more often than non-Hispanic whites would be under similar circumstances. If the CJS treated these groups according to he same legal standards they would middle/lower income whites they would not make up such a disproportionate number of prison/jail inmates.

Homicide[edit]
According to the United States Department of Justice: Blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicides, whites 45.3% and Native Americans and Asians 2.2%, from 1980 to 2008. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most murders were intraracial, with 84% of white homicide victims murdered by whites, and 93% of black victims murdered by blacks.[31][32]

en.wikipedia.org...

So yes, people generally murder people they interact with on a daily basis and since the groups are still so segregated in the USA that also means that crimes&murders are generally intra-racial expect when it comes to economic crimes where people logically try to steal from those who have more than they do instead of stealing from those who have as much or less than they do.

Yes the US multicultural experiment has been a complete success.......

Yes, it has been a success in so far as i has introduced new cultural norms&ideas and ways of interacting that were ultimately monetized&patented resulting in wealth being created. If the systemic discrimination against these groups were changed and they were treated only as strangely as Americans sometimes treat Americans from other US states there would be more wealth creation and less inequality to boot.

Stellar