Our penal system in Denmark is a lot like this and probably what Americans would call too lenient, also. For us, it is important not to dehumanize people. If they commit a crime, they are punished, but that doesn't include making them suffer. (That would dehumanize US, too.) It's important that, if you want people to be able to rejoin society after they've done their time, you don't put them in prisons that turn them into worse people when they come out of jail, than they were before they went in. It's my understanding, that just having your freedom taken away, having other people decide when you eat, when you sleep, etc and being away from family is hard enough on people. We don't have the ...

Our penal system in Denmark is a lot like this and probably what Americans would call too lenient, also. For us, it is important not to dehumanize people. If they commit a crime, they are punished, but that doesn't include making them suffer. (That would dehumanize US, too.) It's important that, if you want people to be able to rejoin society after they've done their time, you don't put them in prisons that turn them into worse people when they come out of jail, than they were before they went in. It's my understanding, that just having your freedom taken away, having other people decide when you eat, when you sleep, etc and being away from family is hard enough on people. We don't have the death penalty either. Despite all this, we have extremely low crime rates. We don't have the element of *revenge* in our system either. Somehow it seems to work.