Ranging across the face of the earth, John Hinderaker over at Powerline appears determined to supply evidence that he still hasn't filled that prescription for a powerful mood-leveller with anti-hallucinogenic properties. The other day he figuratively alit in Norway and reported breathlessly that in the land of fjords criminals are coddled to such an extent that "prison is optional" and corrections officials have trouble laying plans, since they can't know who will or won't show up. His source is not the Norwegian penal code but the estimable Don Surber, whoever that is, and you can be sure that the consequences of this alleged leniency are grim indeed.
Predictably, difficulty in planning prison occupancy is the least of Norway's problems: Surber cites Interpol data to show that Norway's crime rate, and the crime rate across northern Europe generally, is now double that in the United States.
Whoa! Let us test it.
Surber does not link to Interpol data but, rather, to a Danish site that purports to reproduce Interpol data. A table, as you will see if you follow this link, lists six crime categories down the left column and eight countries, including the United States, England, and the Scandinavian countries, across the top. The grid then supplies the number of instances of a particular family of criminal offenses per 100,000 population. But the most cursory inspection reveals that we are not comparing apples to apples. In the USA column, for instance, there is a dash instead of a figure for two of the six crime categories. A "table note" helpfully explains that a dash means "there are either no available registrations or the division of categories cannot be compared with the figures in other countries." Notwithstanding this "note" the table appears to sum the columns, thereby arriving at a total of "all offences." For the US, the "all offences" number is 4160.51, whereas for Norway it is 10086.72. Thus Hinderaker's claim that "Norway's crime rate is double that in the United States"--but, of course, he doesn't mention that Norway's total is ostensibly the sum of six inputs, while the total for the U.S. is the sum of just four.
This detail concerning the dash would of itself only blunt the edge of Hinderaker's conclusion. It requires a wee bit of arithmetical analysis to discredit him utterly. Notice that, in the US column, the "all offences" number is indeed the sum of the number of offenses given for the four crime categories. In the Norway column, however, summing the number of offenses given for six crime categories yields a figure that is only about sixty per cent of the number given for "all offenses." To make Norway's crime rate appear to be twice that of the US, you have to count seven categories of crime in Norway compared to just four in the US--and one of those seven has to be an unrecognized "other" that is forty per cent of the total!
It is not that the data Hinderaker links to is entirely irrelevant to the question of comparative crime rates he raises. One can compare the incidence, per 100,000 population, of four categories of crime for which data is given for both countries. Here goes. For homicide, it is US 5.61 to 2.66 in Norway. For rape: US, 31.77; Norway, 15.12. Serious assault: US, 318.55; Norway, 77.43. And, for theft: US, 3804.58; Norway, 4676.67. For violent criminal offenses, the incidence in the US is more than twice what Norwegians endure. Maybe the US should consider coddling criminals in the European fashion, for an examination of the data for all countries listed in the table suggests that, especially for the most violent offenses, crime rates across northern Europe generally are very much lower than in the United States.
Hinderaker, a Harvard-educated trial lawyer, is I assume capable of seeing through an argument as weak as his own. If an argument no weaker than the one he advances against Norway were made in court against one of his corporate clients, he'd heap righteous scorn upon it. He's a hack.
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