Hello guys my name is Koko and today I want to talk about recidivism. Some of you might know what this word means and some might not, but simply put, recidivism is when a person relapses into criminal behavior after already being punished before for a crime. This certain problem of recidivism is particularly important for the United States of America since this country accounts for 25 percent of the world’s inmates; a high recidivism rate would mean that the number of prisoners in prison would keep rising since prisoners would keep coming back with fresh new faces imbedded in this sea of returning convicts. In America, a country with more than 2.2 million inmates which costs the taxpayers $80 billion a year to keep inside, has a recidivism rate of 76 percent. This means that a country with one of the highest number of prisoners has half of their prisoners returning to become incarcerated again. This means that something is wrong with the prison system; why are these prisoners returning? Are American convicts just bad people?
Well, this problem persists due to the connotation in American prisons that punishment should come after rehabilitation. Two-thirds of convicts return to incarceration because when they were in prison they were treated like dirt, like animals. One can only imagine the psychological damage that prison can do to someone, let alone a person who was already sent to prison either from mental instability or not understanding the law. A prison director of a detention center called Halden from Norway called Are Hoidel said it best, “Do you want people who are angry – or people who are rehabilitated?”
I also bring up this detention center in Norway because Norway has been leading the charge in terms of the progressiveness of correctional facilities in the world. If you do not know what I’m talking about, here’s a little video about a prisoner in a Norwegian detention center.
The prisons also include a music room, library and kitchen areas with all the utensils available for the inmates to use. The prisoners in Norway can only be sentenced to a maximum of 21 years in prison; though five-years can be added onto the sentence every five years until the system decides whether the detainee is rehabilitated or not.
One could argue that some prisoners like murderers deserve to stay in jail forever but this sentence can be in correlation with the severity of the crime. America does not even have to follow Norway’s system of having a maximum 21 year sentence but what American should follow suit is the way that Norway treats their prisoners. Norway already has an incredibly lower incarceration rate in comparison to the US, with 75 arrests per 100,000 people in Norway with 707 arrests per 100,000 people in the US. But the big difference of the system is seen when we notice that only 20% of prisoners in Norway return while a whopping 76% of the prisoners in the United States are rearrested within five years. Though criminals deserve to be put in prison and punished, just taking away their freedom and putting them in isolation is punishment enough, because anything more could only light the fire of crime that had been sparked before in their heads. It’s important to be punished for your actions, it’s also equally important that you don’t imitate these actions again. This is why we should start advocating for more humane prisons all throughout the United States for the tax payers to save money as well as for the people who had to potential to be great but was degraded by what is the prison system of America today.
*Sources*
[Recidivism | National Institute of Justice](http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welcome.aspx)
https://thinkprogress.org/as-the-right-bemoans-norways-criminal-justice-system-it-is-one-of-the-safest-countries-on-earth-f181a7585493#.jmclno8h9
[Why Norway’s prison system is so successful – Business Insider](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-so-successful-2014-12)
https://www.rt.com/usa/312504-prison-reforms-recidivism-hiring/
[Norway | World Prison Brief](http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/norway)
[The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison – The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/the-radical-humaneness-of-norways-halden-prison.html?_r=0)
[Norway’s Halden Prison is most humane in the world | Fusion](http://fusion.net/story/340235/norway-halden-prison-most-humane/)