alt Hacker NewsNo. It's resocialization. > Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The U.S. has one of the highest: 76.6% https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/
And as you probably know, prisons in those two countries are not alike.
Norway actually used to have prisons modelled built on the so-called Philadelphia model [1] with strict isolation. Unsurprisingly it didn't work very well.
It was also one of the prisons that eventually helped drive public opinion away from US-style prisons as punishment because of how extreme it was (recognised also in a 1/3 reduction in sentences if you served there...). It was closed in 1970, around the time when the Nordic movements towards criminal custody reform started really gaining traction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet but the Norwegian page is far more extensive: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet