/* Written 10:40 AM Nov 2, 1998 by jdoug@ix.netcom.com in igc:labr.all */ /* ---------- "Pity the Norwegian Working Class; P" ---------- */ Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 08:13:32 -0700 (MST) From: ANDERSON DAVID
IN THIS MESSAGE: Pity the Norwegian Working Class; Private Prison Hell; Unconventional Wisdom About Government
Norway Pays a Price for Family Values Parents Receive Stipends To Stay Home With Children
By T. R. Reid Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, November 1, 1998; Page A26
OSLO, Norway—Like countless other women around the world, Suranhild Aenstad decided to leave her job and stay at home after her first child was born. Unlike most other young mothers, though, she paid no financial penalty for choosing family over office.
Aenstad was "hired" by the Norwegian government for a new line of work -- staying home to raise her own daughter. The state paid the new mother a yearly salary of $18,800, or 80 percent of what she made as a secretary. With the savings on clothes and commuting, Aenstad came out slightly ahead.
Last spring the baby, Serine -- a buoyant blue-eyed blond with a smile as brilliant as the autumn sun glistening on the Oslofjord beneath her nursery window -- celebrated her first birthday. At that point, Suranhild Aenstad turned the household duties over to her husband, Martin, who quit his job to stay home. So now it is he who receives a monthly paycheck from the government for raising his own child.
Politicians in Norway love to talk about "family values," and in that they're no different from politicians almost everywhere else. What's different here is that Norway has put its money where its mouth is.
The United States pays a small percentage of its mothers a monthly stipend to help them raise and feed their children. These payments carry a stigma. They are known as "welfare," and generally are available only to mothers who prove they can't find work. The Clinton administration and most states have programs in place to reduce the number of "welfare mothers," and governors routinely boast about how much their welfare rolls are being reduced.
Norway, in contrast, treats the monthly payment to parents as a salary. Income and social security taxes are withheld, just as with any paycheck. The payment is designed for working parents, to encourage them to leave the job for a while and raise their children. The government takes pride in statistics showing that the number of recipients has been growing rapidly.
"We have made a fairly basic decision -- although, let's admit it, it took us years to do it," said Valgard Haugland, the leader of Norway's Christian Democratic Party and the minister of Children and Family Affairs.
"We have decided that raising a child is real work. And that this work provides value for the whole society. And that the society as a whole should pay for this valuable service."
It should be noted that this kind of thing is easier for Norway than it might be for nations facing tighter budget strictures. This beautiful northern land, where the icy fiords wrap their deep blue fingers around leafy green hills, is the world's second-largest exporter of oil, after Saudi Arabia. Even with the past year's drop in petroleum prices, Norway has run up a big budget surplus while expanding its generous network of cradle-to-grave state benefits.
Norway's package of parental payments has been put together gradually. More than a decade ago, the government established the initial "maternity right," which pays a parent who leaves a job to raise the baby 80 percent of his or her regular salary. This program gradually has been extended, and now lasts for the first 12 months of the baby's life. When the year is up, the custodial parent has a legal right to return to work -- not just any job, but the same job, with at least the same pay as before.
"This is wonderful for me, that I could be home with Serine and know that my career is protected," said Suranhild Aenstad, 24, who was a secretary in a downtown office when Serine was born.
"But it is not perfect. Women can suffer. We all know that some companies don't hire a woman if they expect you are going to take maternity leave in a few years."
Haugland, the cabinet minister who is known as the "mother of parental payments" because of her support for the proposal, agrees that this can be a problem. "Of course we have made it illegal for an employer to turn down a young applicant for this reason," she said. "But how do you prove it? They will never say they rejected somebody because of maternity leave."
At the moment, however, losing out on a job is not a serious risk. Norway's labor market is so tight -- with the economy strong and unemployment at 3 percent -- that most employers will take any qualified worker, no matter what the parental future might bring.
While the first-year "maternity right" is accepted across the board in political circles, there has been more controversy about the new "parental payment" plan, which pays for child care beyond the first year of life. As of this fall, the government is paying custodial parents during a baby's second year. Funding for a third-year parental payment is proposed in the 1999 budget pending before the Storting, or parliament.
The parental payment is considerably smaller than the first-year maternity right, paying a little less than $5,000 per year. Parents who don't choose to take it can go back to work and send their children to government-subsidized day care, which is known here as kindergarten. The law also says that medical treatment is free for the first seven years of a child's life -- but that's not such a big deal in a country where medical care is subsidized and patients generally pay no more than $10 for a doctor visit.
Almost all political parties in Norway are more liberal than the major U.S. parties. But those on the left, by Norwegian standards, have objected to the budget proposal that would extend the parental payment to a child's third year.
This is partly because the more liberal parties have an ideological commitment to conformity, and they say children should be sent to licensed day care facilities instead of being raised at home.
In addition, the liberals object to the notion of paying parents who choose not to take a job outside the home. When parliament was debating the issue this month, Thorbjorn Jagland, the Labor Party leader and former prime minister, complained that the parental payment is a giveaway. "Why would you pay somebody who does not hold down a job?" he demanded.
Sitting in his cozy apartment here, with 18-month-old Serine bouncing happily on his knee, Martin Aenstad begs to differ. "I've had jobs, and now I'm raising my daughter. And I can tell you that being a house-father is hard work.
"At least when I was on the job, they gave me a lunch break. If Serine is hungry or crying or has a full diaper -- well, you try telling her that Daddy needs a lunch break."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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The Problem With Private Prisons Washington Post
Sunday, November 1, 1998; Page C08
A report released last month by the D.C. Department of Corrections highlighted accounts of horrific conditions at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Facility, where the District began shipping inmates 16 months ago. Yet any veteran corrections official, constitutional scholar, prison advocate or federal judge will tell you that these same inhumanities plague public prisons.
What is different and unfortunate about private correctional facilities is their lack of accountability. Private prison companies are unlicensed and unregulated, and they are expanding their operations at a frenzied pace.
Since the transfer of inmates from the District to the Ohio facility began, 20 inmate stabbings have occurred; two inmates have died from these incidents. Six D.C. inmates also escaped from the Youngstown prison, prompting Ohio Gov. George Voinovich to consider closing the prison because of security concerns. These are concerns that the D.C. Department of Corrections must weigh too as it begins to review a multimillion-dollar contract with Corrections Corp. of America (CCA) to build and maintain a similar facility in the District.
CCA, the largest for-profit prison company in the world, is one of about 20 private prison companies that together bring in more than $250 million a year in revenues from taxpayer dollars. In the northeast Ohio facility, CCA kept costs down by housing violent and nonviolent inmates together -- a practice not employed at public prisons, and one that may have helped to create an explosive environment that led to the stabbings. Private prisons abide by no federal or state contract guidelines, and the reporting clause of private prison contracts also is often weak, requiring only an annual pro-forma report to a legislative committee. In addition, government monitoring of these contracts is often ineffective.
To build a prison, most private companies need only buy a chunk of land in a state where prison beds are scarce and start building. In almost all cases, by the time construction is complete, the companies have found one or several governments (often located several states away) willing to buy the beds. At last count, 17 states were doing business with for-profit prison companies.
What has compounded the negative effects of the privatization of prisons is that the constitutional safeguards and nonprofit watchdog groups previously in place to protect prisoners' rights have been all but eliminated. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, passed as part of the 1994 federal crime bill, undercut existing court orders where federal courts found local systems to be in violation of the Constitution.
The problem with for-profit prisons is not the profit. What is wrong is that the companies are not held accountable for intolerable performance. Taxpayer money is used to subsidize the building of cruel and inhumane environments.
Violent prisons produce violent people, most of whom eventually return to the community. Certainly, this is not the purpose of prisons. Offenders must be held accountable for crimes and punished. Yet studies show that if prisoners attend education and work programs while incarcerated, they are dramatically less likely to commit more crimes when they are released. Sadly, over the past four years, governments systematically have cut these programs, while awarding more contracts to private prison companies, which offer few such programs.
In an age in which privatization is popular yet public safety remains the public's number one concern, we would do well to open up the doors to private prisons and take a good look. We will not like what we see.
-- Nancy Mahon
is director of the Center on Crime, Communities & Culture of the Open Society Institute in New York.
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UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM: New Facts and Hot Stats From the Social Sciences
By Richard Morin
Sunday, November 1, 1998; Page C05 Washington Post
Putting the Good in Good Government
How did some governments come to be so good and some governments so ghastly? That question has provoked a thousand theories but few answers. Now researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago have assembled data from more than 150 countries in an effort to answer the question. In the process, they are challenging some popular assumptions about what makes governments great.
Size does matter, they argue, but not in the way that Ross Perot and othergovernment bashers suspect. Around the world, big governments have been better than smaller governments at doing the things these researchers say government should do: protect individual and property rights, deliver high-quality goods and services efficiently, and foster democratic principles.
High taxes, too, are associated with good governments. "It's quite shocking," laughed one of the researchers, Harvard economist Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes. Apparently "people don't mind paying more for good government. This does not mean that bad governments should grow or tax more to get better. But it does suggest that big does not necessarily mean bad government."
The researchers collected mountains of data from countries around the world, including statistics on gross domestic product, per-capita income, size of government, tax rates, measures of corruption, and salaries of workers employed in the public and private sectors, as well as data on personal freedom, literacy, educational attainment and infant mortality.
To see if economic, cultural and political traditions predict government performance, the researchers looked at each country's religious makeup and examined survey data that measured how much people trusted their fellow citizens. And they ascertained whether a country's laws were based on English, French, German or Scandinavian legal traditions.
"History and traditions matter," Lopez-de-Silanes and economists Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago concluded in a paper they prepared for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Other findings:
The Terrible Tropics Countries farther away from the equator are better governed than those in the torrid zone. No, it's not because bureaucrats in the tropics spend their time lounging on white sand beaches, sipping rum drinks. "In temperate zones, there is much less disease and the agriculture is much more productive," Lopez-de-Silanes said, which may have allowed chillier countries to develop better economies and institutions.
Income Not surprisingly, rich countries are better governed. The surprise is that researchers don't exactly know why. They suspect that wealthier countries can simply afford better government and better educational systems that produce better-trained and more public-spirited citizens. Or maybe good government boosts national income, which in turn whets the appetite for more and perhaps bigger government.
Ethnic Diversity Uh-oh. Don't want to be politically incorrect here, but "ethno-linguistically heterogeneous" countries (those with lots of ethnic groups) don't seem to be as well governed as those with much less diversity. That's because competing ethnic groups too often waste their energy--and squander their country's resources--trying to dominate and sometimes exterminate their rivals, Lopez-de-Silanes said.
Religion Uh-oh again. Don't want to get on any fanatic's hit list here, but the researchers contend that Muslim and Catholic countries are consistently less well-governed than countries with relatively large numbers of Protestants. Lopez-de-Silanes suspects the answer has little to do with religious doctrine. Instead, he notes that Islam and Catholicism were used by rulers to support state power. "The use of these religions for political purposes may have shaped policies in ways that ended up being hostile to good government," he said.
Trust in Individuals Makes sense. If you don't trust others, you're likely not to trust or support government; thus it withers from neglect. "In countries that have higher levels of trust between individuals, we see better government performance on a lot of measures," Lopez-de-Silanes said. Again, he suspects religion may play a key role. Catholics and Muslims tend to be more mistrustful of others than Protestants are, he said. One reason may be that these religions are hierarchical, with strict chains of ecclesiastical command that suppress the development of what other scholars call "horizontal bonds of fellowship."
The French Connection Countries whose laws are based on the Napoleonic Commercial Code tend to be badly governed, while those based on English common law tend to have good governments. Lopez-de-Silanes said that's because the Napoleonic Code was designed to protect state interests over those of the individual, while English common law was designed to protect individuals' rights "and particularly property rights" from the state (specifically, the monarch).
"This is one of our most important and powerful [findings]," he said. "Legal systems that have their origin in French civil law predict inferior government performance; this seems to be driving a lot of stuff, from the quality of government to the development of business and commerce."
It's true in Indonesia and Zaire, these researchers claim, and also in Mexico and, of course, in France. It may even be true in the United States. Well, maybe just in one state: Louisiana, which is the only state whose legal system is based on French civil law--and a state whose government has been historically corrupt. "It certainly is one data point that fits our theory well," Lopez-de-Silanes said.
You can reach The Unconventional Wiz at: morinr@washpost.com
* Here's a list of the 10 best and the 10 worst governments in the world, based on how efficiently government delivers quality goods and services, levels of personal freedom, and the degree to which the government interferes in the private sector. The list was compiled by Harvard economist Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes.
Overall French Origin of
Ranking Country Commercial Code?
TOP 10 COUNTRIES
1. New Zealand No
2. Switzerland No
3. Norway No
4. United Kingdom No
5. Canada No
6. Iceland No
7. United States of America No
8. Finland No
9. Sweden No
10. Australia No
BOTTOM 10 COUNTRIES
1. Zaire Yes
2. Sierra Leone No
3. Sudan No
4. Haiti Yes
5. Cameroon Yes
6. Mali Yes
7. Syrian Arab Republic Yes
8. Indonesia Yes
9. Niger Yes
10. Algeria Yes
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company |