For years now, the US has been battling overcrowded prisons. The sheer numbers of Americans who wind up in prison for relatively minor as well as horribly violent crimes have put us on the map -- not a map we can take pride in.
Meanwhile, Sweden is closing prisons down. You only have to see the interiors of Swedish prisons to begin to understand how this could happen. They look a little like boarding schools -- hopeful and humane. What seems to be missing is the meanness and anger of a system like ours, a system that has little if any respect for its inmates. We suffer from an inchoate anger against "them" -- where "them" can mean just about anything our fears can create at any given moment. And that includes, notably, non-whites.
The Swedes don't suffer from the need to punish. They've been using rehabilitation to shorten sentences and have been taking a fresh look at their legal system.
One partial explanation for the sudden drop in admissions may be that Swedish courts have given more lenient sentences for drug offences following a ruling of the country's supreme court in 2011. ...
... Hanns von Hofer, a criminology professor at Stockholm University, said that much of the fall in prison numbers could be attributed to a recent shift in policy towards probationary sanctions instead of short prison sentences for minor thefts, drugs offences and violent crimes.
Of the fall in prison population between 2004 and 2012, he pointed out, 36% related to theft, 25% to drugs offences and 12% to violent crimes.
According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million. ...TheGuardian
It's the larger, less cohesive nations with less respect for human rights and healthy communities who share the position of the US with respect to crime and the law.
According to data collected by the International Centre for Prison Studies, the five countries with the highest prison population are the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India.
The US has a prison population of 2,239,751, equivalent to 716 people per 100,000. China ranks second with 1,640,000 people behind bars, or 121 people per 100,000, while Russia's inmates are 681,600, amounting to 475 individuals per 100,000. ...TheGuardian
Size matters. The same lag of development and progress that we experience in the US, in contrast to Sweden, has the same origin as our disrespectful, sometimes violent, politics. America has allowed itself to become a dystopia in which people -- lately vets and prisoners -- are treated like throwaways.
