>>>What stikes me as a typical american ignorant attitude (call that anti americanism, if you want) here, is the hard right wing approach of harder punishments and revenge sentences while if anyone with an open mind looks at it and is willing to compare the situation in any other country sees it does not work. There seems to be a total lack of progressive thinking to look at the causes of the problem and actually do something about it. It is simply dismissed with a macho and blinded stance, with harder and longer imprisonments, as if that is going to help...
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>>In this you are wrong Walter. All of the ideas you mentioned above have been tried here as well
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>And then hastily proclaimed as ineffective, as "criminals are overprotected". All these programs are under public scrutiny and they all stated as isolated attempts to see what works - but then them being special cases is what makes them ineffective. They can't be isolated, not in a living human society, so any pretense of "let's change this and see how it works" is illusory, if nothing else changes; the environment stays as it was. Can't really come up as an illustrative example here, but... here, imagine easier criminals, deemed fixable, get a chance to do community service during the day, and go back to prison for the night. Nice, eh? But what would the pressure from other inmates be to use these guys as a couriers? How does that count, as success or a failure, if they're caught with narcotics - if they were blackmailed into smuggling them in?
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>What may pass as a nice social experiment in some places around here, is still not backed up with as wide a social action as in Netherlands (and I imagine most of Europe as well). Here, it has to fight for its right to existence, has to prove that it works against a majority (or a very loud or rich minority - effect is the same) which sees these attempts as bleeding heart pinko librul soft-on-crime --> soft-on-terror --> soft-on-defence --> therefore traitor stuff.
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>Let's not forget that prison labor is cheaper than sweatshop labor, specially when tax money provides the bed and breakfast for the laborers.
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>>...and there are many new programs going on right now.
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>And since I know you expect me to say that, I will: programs, but no system. System has got 1% of the people behind bars.

I do agree with you, however, there are programs across the country which are being tested where the person sentenced is not sentenced to prison time, but to a program run by either tax paid employees or volunteers. In the program, the person has a mentor(s) and is put into a program which allows for training and rehabilitation. I've a seen a few and some that work with teens appear to be working on about 70-85% of the criminals which is huge. It is only in a few places though and if the person offends again, he is removed from the program and of course is sentenced then as a repeat offender. The goal is to stop offenders from repeating of course and put them into a situtation where they can function without breaking the law. The point is that it is not generally made public until the test of the program has completed (5-10 years) and then only if it is successful. For those programs non-successful, I do not know if the program itself is revised or just dropped.