Actually, solitary confinement is pretty standard in Denmark. And for that reason, the UN has even raised concerns about it. Not that anything has happened in this regard.

Very odd that supposedly advanced Denmark would impose barbaric solitary confinement. How we as a species still get away with this tactic is beyond me.

Definitions of advanced and barbaric vary wildly.

In particular, what Denmark considers really barbaric are long sentences: 10, 20, 30+ years are quite unusual. Most sentences are less than 2 years, with a handful of severe sentences in the high single-digit range.

The list of things that are beyond me, and probably many member on this board can be quite long. A radical example is: who decided that planet Earth belonged to a bunch of corrupted politicians and executives and not the rest of us, preventing people to roam freely, and to freely decide where they can live, work, raise their family...

To argue against the line "it's only natural that the corrupt seize power" look no further than the various cases where decency and enlightenment prevailed.

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

200,000 years of history

Even the worst violent offenders are heavily limited in the number of victims they can produce. Using a computer can affect many orders of magnitude beyond that so why exactly should "non-violent" prisoners be given more freedoms and better treatment?

Is this "less bad" than mugging someone?

  "He is accused of braking into the danish police systems, 
  including out driver license database that holds our 
  Civil Registration System number witch can easily be used 
  to identity fraud" 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897572

It's not about bad or less bad, it's about risk to people.

A violent criminal poses greater risk of harm, and thus is locked up. A non violent criminal can commit very many offences, and sometimes those offences cause great distress (fraud which removes a person's life savings, for example), and their access to the tools of their criminal trade should be restricted, but that doesn't usually require solitary confinement.

I would argue solitary is the only rationale option for non-violent crime like this - anything less requires the person to respect limitations on communication they can circumvent if they want.

There are sometimes legitimate concerns, but I think they tend to be overblown in the case of computer crime. Along the lines of the insane worries that Kevin Mitnick couldn't be granted access to a phone because he might hack teh USA by whistling into the phone, I think there is often a weird witchcraft-style reaction to computer crime, where the defendant is seen as some kind of nearly omnipotent wizard.

ummm.... I thought violent criminals are kept in solitary confinement because they are dangerous to their fellow inmates. A hacker may be able to cause more harm to more people IF he is outside and has a computer. He can't exactly destroy the lives of other inmates while he is in prison...

First of all, let's be clear that risk of fraud to an individual is often as harmful, if not more harmful, than risk of violence to an individual. Fraud that takes out a person's entire life savings, even if the victim doesn't commit suicide, typically does more lasting damage than, say, the average case of assault and battery. And that's not just true with identity theft. Stealing money alone can cause people to commit suicide as in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

So then the question becomes which type of criminal is more likely to commit more crimes if not in solitary confinement. Obviously it depends on the specific kind of criminal but in general, I'd say perpetrators of fraud if they have Internet access and violent criminals if they don't have Internet access.

Let's assume that you're right, and fraud causes more harm ot individuals than a punch to the face.

A prisoner has little opportunity to commit fraud. They don't need to be put into solitary confinement to restrict their access to the Internet.

That's absolutely true. I was not commenting on whether or not they need solitary confinement. I was stating that the claim in your second paragraph--that violent criminals almost always pose more danger to society than non-violent criminals--is not true. It would seem several people strongly disagreed with me...

  Fraud that takes out a person's entire life savings, even 
  if the victim doesn't commit suicide, typically does more 
  lasting damage than, say, the average case of assault and 
  battery. 

I disagree with you in every possible way, and I think you've just decided, off the top of your head, to make that up because you think it sounds good. You might be able to google some statistics, but I'm not drinking your kool-aid.

Assault resulting in serious injury is categorically worse than fraud or identity theft, and far more common.