The United States accounts for 5% of the world’s population, yet it holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. Within three years, about 66% of released prisoners can expect to be rearrested. Compare this to the 30-40% in Sweden.

How does Sweden retain such a low recidivism rate? The director-general of Swedish prison and probation service, Nils Öberg believes it’s the country’s focus on prison as rehabilitation, rather than punishment, as the United States tends to do. “It [incarceration] has to be a goal to get them back out into society in better shape than they were when they came in,” Öberg told The Guardian in 2014.

Sweden is not the only country to take this approach. Many European countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, use incarceration as an opportunity to rehabilitate criminals in what has been described as an “open” prison system. This system includes, televisions in every cell, access to video games, unlimited visitation rights, no dress code, and a maximum of a 21-year sentence.

This starkly contrasts from the US system where prisoners may spend up to 23-24 hours in an 80-square-foot cell with no windows, phones, visitors, or physical activity. Solitary confinement is a common punishment, especially for criminals deemed highly dangerous.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has spoken out against solitary confinement, saying it leads to decreased mental stability and violates one’s human rights.

However, American citizen, Jim Sander, disagrees. “If you violated someone’s rights, you don’t have rights yourself,” he said. While he doesn’t believe solitary confinement is effective in all cases, Sander adds that he tends to lean toward the eye-for-an-eye belief.

This belief is what led to massive overpopulation in American prisons. There are more African-Americans behind bars than during the Apartheid, with 851 of 100,000 people in South Africa, and 4,347/100,000 in the US. Our country has 2.4 million prisoners, which equates to more than 1 out of every 100 American citizens. This leads to 3.5 times the amount of prisoners than Mexico, who has been in a drug war since 2006.

“Other than the US, most of the countries with high incarceration rates have had a very recent social trauma,” executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, Peter Wagner, noted to Vice. “New York has the same incarceration rate as Rwanda and there has not been a massive genocide in New York State.”

Overpopulation has multiple issues, including violence. There are more than 200,000 rape reports of male inmates every year. In fact, the Justice Department has threatened to cut federal grants to states that don’t decrease the number of sexual assaults. However, the threat of violence still lingers, as many cases go unreported.

“I was constantly mentally preparing to fight to the death to stop it [rape] happening to me,” former inmate, Shaun Attwood, told The Independent. “If you report anything in prison, you’re deemed a snitch and it’s KOS — kill on sight — for snitches.”

Another effect of overpopulation is the lack of humanization of prisoners. From the time they are arrested, they lose their identity, instead being identified by a number. Once they go behind bars, the prisoners become just another criminal rather than a human being.. This again contrasts to the policies in Norway. In Bastøy Prison, off the coast of Oslo, Norway and governed by Arne Nilsen, wardens often form close bonds with prisoners, mingling with them and offering guidance. Perhaps this is why Norway has a recidivism rate of just 20%, one of the lowest in the world. The US must begin to follow in the Norwegians’ footsteps.

Although American states have set policies to extend prison sentences in the past, their budgets have grown tighter, and they need to find cheaper criminal justice systems. In 2014, the US Sentencing Commission voted to lighten sentences for 46,000 prisoners who are currently serving for drug-related crimes. This would allow the criminals to petition to have their sentences reduced by 17%. A study done by The Sentencing Project showed that states with lowered prison populations also have crime rates falling faster than the national average.

Many may oppose the controversial prisons of Nordic countries, but they have found a system that appears to work. While the open prisons may not have a perfect place in America, politicians are keeping an open mind towards reforms of the incarceration system, including giving back some humanity to prisoners.

“If we treat people like animals when they are in prison, they are likely to behave like animals,” Nilsen explained to The Guardian. “Here [in Norway], we pay attention to you as a human being.”