No job? Get lost! In one part of Norway, unemployment isn't allowed.

• Author: Higgins, Andrew

Norway's northernmost territory, Svalbard, has a police force with just six officers and a single jail cell for an area twice the size of New Jersey. But even that is overkill: Nobody has been locked up in the capital, Longyearbyen, since the summer of 2013. And that was for just two days.

The key to Svalbard's status as Europe's closest thing to a crime-free society, according to the governor, is that unemployment is, in effect, illegal.

"If you don't have a job, you can't live here," Governor Odd Olsen Ingero says.

How is such a policy enforced? By deporting the jobless. Even retirees are sent away unless they can prove they can support themselves. Homelessness is also banned; all residents must have a permanent address.

The unusual rules have a lot to do with Svalbard's geography and climate. An archipelago located 800 miles from the North Pole, Svalbard is shrouded in near-total darkness for six months of the year and snowfall continues deep into summer. The government says that banning homelessness and unemployment--a problem plaguing much of Europe (see chart)--is meant to ensure that none of Svalbard's nearly 3,000 residents freezes to death.

Front Doors Unlocked

"[It] is a very quiet and law-abiding society," says Ingero. In total, the police in Svalbard handle about 100 cases a year, most of which involve infractions like reckless driving on snowmobiles and shoplifting. Residents regularly leave their car and snowmobile keys in the ignition and don't bother locking their front doors. Coffee shop patrons leave their computers unattended, never worrying they might get stolen. No serious crimes have been reported so far this year; however, the authorities are worried about a spate of littering by untidy scientists who failed to clean up their garbage after doing research in the wilderness.

Ingero, who spent most of his previous career fighting crime as a senior police official on the Norwegian mainland, isn't advocating the Svalbard approach as a solution to crime elsewhere. But he does think it shows a clear link between unemployment and lawlessness.

At the same time, it also seems to debunk a view held by populist parties across Europe, including Norway, that immigration is largely to blame for rising crime: Svalbard has no restrictions on foreigners. In fact, nearly a third of all residents are from elsewhere, including Thailand and China; hundreds of Ukrainians also work in a mining operation owned by Russia. "The demographics...