Crime In Oslo

The Anders Breivik case sparked some discussion in our office about the relatively cushy prison conditions in Norway. Interestingly, even though Norway is an outlier countries in so many ways, Oslo is a pretty average western European capital in terms of violent crime:

Clearly, compared to the United States, all western European cities are quite safe. In 2009, we had a nationwide murder rate of 5 per 100,000 with the figures for many large cities obviously much worse than that. But compared to other European countries, Oslo is getting beaten out by the capitals of some other substantially poorer countries like Portugal and Spain. Of course much more goes into crime control policy than prison conditions so I would hesitate to draw any firm conclusions.