The Soviets believed that reform happened through labor and by all accounts they were right, the recidivism rate in the USSR was something like 12-18%. This seems high in isolation but even today recidivism rates are higher.
This requires an understanding of the causes of crime which are pretty much common knowledge at this point so I’m not going to repeat them. But there is a difference between capitalist labor and proletarian labor. In the USSR, prisoners worked on public interests projects, maybe even projects that they would benefit from later (such as the Volga Canal for inmates living in Moscow). Giving back to the collective from which you took in the form of labor. Gulags were pretty much self-sufficient villages, some didn’t even need guards but I assume had officials working there. Being able to still have contact with the outside world and socially as well is very important for inmates and to be honest I don’t think capitalist countries are going about it in the right way. There’s been several stories here of inmates taken outside who managed to escape from their leisurely walks and hurt people in the process. But I think this is more of a structural problem, trying to do too much too fast. They know this is beneficial for inmates but the structure in place is the penitentiary structure and not able to accommodate this new method properly.
In capitalist countries, prison labor only enriches the bourgeoisie and serves no common purpose. Rolling cigarettes or stamping license plates is not in the public interest.
The Soviets believed that reform happened through labor and by all accounts they were right, the recidivism rate in the USSR was something like 12-18%.
I think doing socially useful labor was part of this, but the USSR also was far ahead of capitalist countries in terms of guaranteeing basic human needs like housing, food, medicine, and education. Taking care of those covers a lot of reasons to reoffend.
Breivik should’ve been shot, point blank
On the other hand, I think prisons like Norway should be the standard; somewhere to continue your daily life, while giving also reflecting and reform one’s self from their criminal past.
In general, prisons should be more based around positive and negative reinforcement, not destruction of one’s life.
I share almost all of your sentiments. Prisons and incarceration in general should just be one aspect of bettering society, through reform, work release, parole, community service, therapy. Most people are pretty decent when it comes down to it and when they are given a chance to get better.
Part of me agrees that Breivik should have been executed, but another part of me thinks that would be the easy way out, and he should have to suffer for decades.
The longer I think about it the harder I find it justified to spend so many resources on making someone suffer for the horrible things they’ve done. Even if he was actually suffering and not fake suffering to try and get better entertainment I think its only asking for more trouble to keep around a far-right reactionary that’s been stewing inside their own head for this long.
Edit: To followup this isn’t to say that I’m in favor of the death penalty in general. I’m not, except in extreme circumstances like these where the evidence is so overwhelming that there is no possible question as to the guilt of the accused and the harm caused is abnormally large in scope and scale.
China does suspended death sentences. If in a 2 year period after your sentencing new charges come to light, you will get the death sentence. I think the point is to incentivize the guilty to admit to all their crimes and not hide anything from the prosecution. I don’t know how well it works as I don’t have data but on paper at least it makes sense. If you get life in prison for your 10 crimes, you might as well admit to the other 4 since the only way it can get worse for you is for police to find out about them and your life in prison turns into death. It’s not a scenario where you gain anything by not talking.
It’s still a prison in a bourgeois dictatorship.
I can say that Norway’s prisons are “better” than the prisons in the USA, but to say this feels like it’s ignoring the roles that the prisons actually play in either country, and the historical factors behind why the prison systems ended up so different from one another between the countries — i.e. while in both countries the prisons exist to uphold bourgeois rule, in the USA the prisons serve to more specifically reinforce the economic exploitation of Black people through prison labor and long-term harm to their well-being, whereas this is a non-factor in Norway, where most of the country’s super-exploited can just be outright deported if they’re caught doing a “crime”, right? A 2015 article from Forskning.no quotes an employee of the Oslo police force, “Why should we use so much capacity imprisoning him up here instead of just flying him out again?”
I also feel like the discussion about Norway’s prison system is still pretty dominated by how it’s covered by bourgeois media, which tends to glamorize the actual conditions inside Norwegian prisons, either to frame Norway as a saintly society where even the worst monsters are treated with dignity, or to push an angle that the prisons are “too lenient” — when the truth is that you do have prison suicides in Norway, too, and my only experience meeting an ex-convict in Norway was someone who was a terminally unemployed addict (which, granted, is only an anecdote).
There’s a lot that I don’t know about the prisons in this country, or about prisons in general, but I’m still gonna link some 2023 articles from Tjen Folket on Bredtveit women’s prison and its human rights violations here:
https://tjen-folket.no/2023/05/28/bredtveit-kvinnefengsel-isolasjon-og-manglende-helsehjelp/
I mean if he wants to starve himself he can go right ahead, it is not the states job to give in to all of his temper tantrums
