Question

please answer the question after reading the below article

Please note that the answer should be in your own words.......

What do you think? Consider the history of prisons in the U.S. and our cultural history. Why does the U.S. seem to have a much greater need to punish people as compared to other western nations??

Article is below;

Norway Mass Killer Gets the Maximum: 21 Years

OSLO — Convicted of killing 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting attack in July last year, the Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced on Friday to 21 years in prison — fewer than four months per victim — ending a case that thoroughly tested this gentle country’s collective commitment to values like tolerance, nonviolence and merciful justice..
Mr. Breivik, lawyers say, will live in a prison outside Oslo in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop, albeit one without Internet access. If he is not considered a threat after serving his sentence, the maximum available under Norwegian law, he will be eligible for release in 2033, at the age of 53.

However, his demeanor, testimony and declaration that he would have liked to kill more people helped convince the judges that, however lenient the sentence seems, Mr. Breivik is unlikely ever to be released from prison. He could be kept there indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions to his sentence.

The relative leniency of the sentence imposed on Mr. Breivik, the worst criminal modern Scandinavia has known, is no anomaly. Rather, it is consistent withNorway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe — and in contrast with much of the United States, whose criminal justice system is considered by many Europeans to be cruelly punitive — Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.

Even some parents who lost children in the attack appeared to be satisfied with the verdict, seeing it as fair punishment that would allow the country, perhaps, to move past its trauma.

“Now we won’t hear about him for quite a while; now we can have peace and quiet,” Per Balch Soerensen, whose daughter was among the dead, told TV2, according to The Associated Press. He felt no personal rancor toward Mr. Breivik, he was quoted as saying.

“He doesn’t mean anything to me,” Mr. Soerensen said. “He is just air.”

Even more than a year later, the events of that day are still almost impossible to fathom, so brutally, methodically and callously was the attack carried out. After setting off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, Mr. Breivik made his way to tiny Utoya Island, where, dressed as a police officer and toting a virtual arsenal of weapons, he calmly and systematically hunted down and shot dead 69 others, most of them young people attending a summer camp run by the Labor Party. Hundreds were wounded.

Norway’s soft-touch approach, which defers to the rights of the accused and the rights of victims as much as it gives weight to the arguments of prosecutors, informed every aspect of Mr. Breivik’s trial. As the accused, he was given ample time to speak of his rambling, anti-Muslim, anti-multicultural political views, which included a rant about the “deconstruction” of Norway at the hands of “cultural Marxists.”

He interrupted witnesses freely, smiled when the verdict was announced and entered court on Friday making a fascist salute, his right fist clenched.

“The thoughts of murder were evidently stimulating for the defendant,” Judge Arne Lyng said, reading from the 90-page judgment. “This was clear when he talked about decapitating ex-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.” It is hard to imagine, the judgment continues, “that such a term-limited sentence is sufficient to protect this country from this man.”

As the court listened to the killer, so it listened to his victims, who were treated in the proceedings with care, even tenderness. The court heard 77 autopsy reports, listened to short biographies describing the lives of each of the dead and allowed the survivors to describe in great detail what happened and how it has affected them since.

“At first I was shot in the arms and I thought, ‘O.K., I can survive this; it’s O.K. if you’re shot in the arms,’ ” Ina Rangones Libak, 22, said in May in testimony that had spectators laughing and crying by turns, according to news accounts at the time. “Then I was shot in the jaw. I thought, ‘O.K., this is a lot more serious.’ Then I was shot in the chest and I thought, ‘O.K., this is going to kill me.’ ”

But as she lay there, she heard a friend say, “We can’t leave Ina here,” and she was then cradled by a group who hid together even as Mr. Breivik shot others nearby, taking off their clothes to use as tourniquets. In the end, Ms. Libak told the court, “We are stronger than ever.”

The sense that Mr. Breivik’s hateful beliefs should not be allowed to fill Norway with hate, too, was part of the country’s response to the attacks from the beginning. In April, tens of thousands of people around the country gathered for a mass singalong of “Children of the Rainbow,” a song Mr. Breivik denounced in court as Marxist propaganda, to show that he had not shattered their commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness.

Mr. Breivik’s guilt was never at issue in the 10-week trial, which ended in June; the question was whether he was sane, as he claimed, or insane, as the prosecutors argued. On Friday, a five-panel judge ruled him sane and gave him what he had sought: incarceration in a regular prison, not a mental hospital.

Many said they did not mind that Mr. Breivik prevailed in his argument, since the court’s declaration that he was not insane forced him to be accountable for what he had done.

“I am relieved to see this verdict,” said Tore Sinding Beddekal, who survived the shootings on Utoya by hiding in a storeroom. “The temptation for people to fob him off as a madman has gone. It would have been difficult to unite the concept of insanity with the level of detail in his planning.”

Unni Espeland Marcussen, whose 16-year-old daughter, Andrine, was killed by Mr. Breivik, said: “I will never get my daughter Andrine back, but I also think that the man who murdered her has to take responsibility, and that’s good.”

Bjorn Magnus Ihler, who survived the Utoya shootings, said that Norway’s treatment of Mr. Breivik was a sign of a fundamentally civilized nation.

“If he is deemed not to be dangerous any more after 21 years, then he should be released,” Mr. Ihler said. “That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles, and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed our society.”

Answer 1

Given below is the analysis of cultural dimensions of USA, based on Hofstede Cultural dimensions:

1. Power Distance: America values equality and participatory form of doing business. All are considered equal and there is not much hierarchy. Organizations also have flat structures. Every employee of the organization has equal rights of expressing his concerns.
2. Masculinity: America stands high on the masculinity quotient of cultural dimensions. Americans love being competitive and are always ready to take challenges. The overall society aspires to become achievers. Success is what matters the most to them, the path followed to achieve success is not considered important.
3. Individualism: USA is highly individualistic country. The nation prefers nuclear family than joint ones. Preference is given to family over others. Loyalty is also biased towards personal favorite entities in business
4. Long Term Orientation: Americans live in the present and care very less about the future. They believe in attainment of short-term goals and do not worry much about the long term objectives
5. Uncertainty avoidance: USA is a risk taking country. They like to grab opportunities, without giving much considerations to the outcome. They accept change with open hands.

In general terms, Americans are considered to be high risk takers. They like accepting challenges and work their way around to conquer it. Decisions are taken quickly by them as they consider only the short-term implications of any decision and are not concerned about the long-term objectives. This depicts the severity of criminal tendencies in the citizens of the country. They may take crime as a risk and conduct it with no fear about the long term punishment which they may serve. Hence, the rate as well as severity of crime can be greater in USA than in other country of the world. In my views, the severity of criminal punishments in the country is mostly to keep this risk taking tendency of the citizens in check and make them law abiding and social beings.