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Comment by mdf | Hacker News Reader

Yle - Finland's national broadcasting company - broadcast a TV-series named The Pohjoismaat (The Nordic Countries), where people from around the world are taken around in Nordic Countries and shown things they might consider weird. The first episode[1] was about a prison warden from the U.S. and the humane way how e.g. Finland and Norway treat their prisoners. The warden gets to visit Halden in Norway.

[1] http://areena.yle.fi/tv/2199727 (the audio is partly in Finnish and Swedish, but the parts where they take the warden around also contain English; the subtitles are only available in Finnish and Swedish)

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We (Finland) also do have some ideas about "let's put old people in prisons and criminals in old people's institutions!"

This way the old people could get five healthy meals served to them daily, a possibility to shower every day, have some activity arranged to them regularly, and they would get paid instead of having to pay for their care.

Criminals would get only cold food, spend almost all their time alone, have their lights switched off at 8PM, and get to shower once a week, if the warden happens to be on a good mood.

That said, I don't object to prisons being the way they are. I object to the extremely lenient sentences for violent crimes. The only crimes where punishment is harsh seem to be tax and drug offences.

Just look at the recent case where a woman was held captive for four years, was forced to give birth to three babies while being held. The sentence for perpetrators? 3 years 10 months for the main responsible, of which he will do less than two years in prison. And he's appealing for too harsh sentence. This system is slightly too humane for my taste.

Well, it's important to remember the tabloids are always seeking to evoke feelings of outrage.

Anecdotes about too-lenient senteces always make it to the headlines, but errors in the other direction don't. Without credible studies we can't know which kind of errors cause more harm.

Prison population and budget is orders of magnitude smaller than elder care so the swap is just a values-related thought experiment about elder care. (Hopefully its inventor didn't mean to invoke "pampering criminals"). Of course it's an outrage that voters and politicians underbudget it so badly, but that's what you get with this austerity and anti-welfare mindset that's gripping Europe.

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