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• Friday, April 3, 2009 05:24 PM

  Culture *can* be overcome

  But it takes work. There's no reason, culturally, that drug decriminalization couldn't be successful in the US in one form or another (same for fixing the healthcare problem and other issues), but a comparison of the cultures might be valuable and help inform how some countries got there and how the US could get there. This is a *quick and dirty* comparison of the prison rates of the US and Portugal (couldn't find anything related specifically to drug use) and of one of Geert Hofstede's Four Dimensions of Culture, Individualism (for more, see links below). This demonstrates that there is at least one significant cultural difference between the two countries that might be an important factor in determining what might work best in changing public opinion here.

  One striking difference among modern nations is their rate of imprisonment: the share of the population that is locked up in a penitentiary institution. This share is particularly large in the United States....
  
  Another factor influencing the imprisonment rate is the purpose of punishment. The short-term solution, practiced in the United States and to a lesser extent in Britain, is to protect society by locking criminals away. This leads to long prison sentences. The long-term solution is to reform criminals and recycle them into productive citizens, leading to shorter sentences and lower rates of imprisonment. Strongly individualist societies

  are more likely to see the criminal as the problem and punish him or her; less individualist societies are more likely to see the crime as the problem and focus on correcting its causes.

  [Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind (Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede, 1996)]

  Prison population rates per 100,000

  Portugal: 104 (based on an estimated national population of 10.64 million at end of February 2009 [from Eurostat figures])

  US: 756 (based on an estimated national population of 303.15 million at end of 2007 [U.S. Census Bureau])

  The Cultural Dimension of Individualism
  Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, that is the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.

  On the cultural dimension of individualism, US society as a whole rates 91; Portugal rates 27.

  Links:

  Prison Rates: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/

  Geert Hofsted, Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at the University of Maastricht: http://feweb.uvt.nl/center/hofstede/index.htm

  More on the Dimensions of Culture: http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/intercultural/dimensions.html

  Question: Does anyone happen to know of a site with a comparison of drug laws (preferably ranked by severity)? I'd love to plug those ratings in with the dimensions of culture and see what happens. I've found several sites that deal with specific regions, but haven't been able to find it all in one neat and tidy place. TIA

  —EJ Read EJ's other letters
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