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View Full Version : While crime rate in the US keeps rising, in Netherlands it is almost nonexistent



PDub
07-10-2017, 07:29 AM
Life behind bars gets new twist in empty Dutch prisons (https://www.yahoo.com/news/life-behind-bars-gets-twist-empty-dutch-prisons-025753174.html)

The Dutch believe in rehabilitation, not incarceration, and one of the oldest prisons in Holland, built in 1886, is closed.

"Falling crime rates over the last decade, as well as changing ideas about punishing criminals have robbed this penitentiary of its original purpose, and its gates clanged shut in 2014."

The U.S. needs to learn from this example, and eliminate its lock 'em mentality, which does nothing more than create concentrated criminality as prisoners learn more crime tricks from other criminals as they spend time in custody. Prisons in the U.S. have been institutions of criminality. As BLOW hero George Jung said about his stint in U.S. federal prison,

Danbury wasn't a prison. It was a crime school.
I went in with a bachelor of marijuana...
came out with a doctorate of cocaine

We should learn from the Dutch about how to reduce crime here

"Judges are sentencing people in different ways. Not more lightly, but differently, with community service, or ankle bracelets, and rehabilitation clinics"

And ease back on the latest movement towards longer and longer sentences

Attorney General Jeff Sessions enacts harsher charging, sentencing policy (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/12/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-enacts-harsher-charging-sentencing-policy/101571324/)

which really just solve nothing and perpetuate the problem.