Norway Builds the World's Most Humane Prison

Exercpt:
Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ($252 million) in the making, Halden is spread over 75 acres (30 hectares) of gently sloping forest in southeastern Norway. The facility boasts amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. Unlike many American prisons, the air isn't tinged with the smell of sweat and urine. Instead, the scent of orange sorbet emanates from the "kitchen laboratory" where inmates take cooking courses. "In the Norwegian prison system, there's a focus on human rights and respect," says Are Hoidal, the prison's governor. "We don't see any of this as unusual." (See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.)

Halden, Norway's second largest prison, with a capacity of 252 inmates, opened on April 8. It embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society. "When they arrive, many of them are in bad shape," Hoidal says, noting that Halden houses drug dealers, murderers and rapists, among others. "We want to build them up, give them confidence through education and work and have them leave as better people." Countries track recidivism rates differently, but even an imperfect comparison suggests the Norwegian model works. Within two years of their release, 20% of Norway's prisoners end up back in jail. In the U.K. and the U.S., the figure hovers between 50% and 60%. Of course, a low level of criminality gives Norway a massive advantage. Its prison roll lists a mere 3,300, or 69 per 100,000 people, compared with 2.3 million in the U.S., or 753 per 100,000 — the highest rate in the world.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html?hpt=T2#ixzz0mpotx8Tp

and how inmates might be inclined to behave once they've served their sentences.

Wow, I came off as totally bitchy. :o

On a more serious note, I love the irony in your post.

You: "We suck. You suck. All of us suck. Why can't we wake up and realize just how pathetic we are and how much we suck!"
Them: "We try to build people up, and give them confidence in the hopes they leave as better people."

Was it lost in translation or something? :P I think you missed the message!

If we're not the best at something, then we have to be the worst.

:rofl:

xxx

some of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

God! We just do SO many things wrong over here...

...you will never see that here.

:)

But rapists and murderers? No, most of them don't deserve to be reintegrated into society.

The inner idealist in me wants to believe what they're doing works.

But then my skeptic nature kicks in, and I wonder what these people are smoking. I want to see hard facts and peer reviewed studies.

However, what they're doing and what we're doing are two completely different things.

In the United States our focus is on justice for the victims, and we achieve that through punishing those that committed the crime. We're trying to right a wrong, so to speak. Thus, our prisons are not meant to be posh places of joy and happiness. They're meant to be places of well - to be blunt - places of retribution.

In Norway they're focus is completely reversed. Punishment has been thrown out the window, and they've focused 90% - 100% on rehabilitating the criminal.

Because of that I'm not really shocked that they have a low recidivism rate compared to our own.

However, I'd like to hear someone sincerely tell me that they'd be happy knowing that someone who raped and murdered their child was going to a place such as this in Norway. I'd like to know if they'd feel denied justice.

are able to rehabilitate people who have committed crimes.

Ours we know is a failure mainly because we do not think of society as a whole, but only of satisfying a need for vengeance. They are clearly far stronger emotionally and far more evolved as a people than most other countries. We equate strength with violence when it actually takes far more strength not to give in to the need for revenge, which in the end serves no purpose.

I do disagree that they are not punishing criminals. The punishment is the loss of freedom. No matter how nice a place their prisons may be, nothing can really compensate for not being free.

Here, that loss becomes secondary in our brutal prison system as all energy has to be focused on survival in a prison system that is among the worst in the civilized world.

Because it is so brutal, many people who might otherwise have become decent members of society, are lost.

I remember a few years ago seeing a black woman whose grandson had been murdered by a white racist in an interview on tv. She was there because she had forgiven her grandson's killer and that is so unusual in this society that she made the news.

She had done more than forgive him, she had become like a mother to him. It started when she asked to see him, she wanted to know why he had done what he did to her grandson. For her it was important to understand that. It's hard to understand how she was able to overcome her anger and end up having sympathy for him but he did change. It took time but eventually he developed an ability to have remorse for what he had done.

For her part, the important thing was, she said, that she got rid of the anger she had felt which was destroying her. But she is rare in this revenge-seeking society we live in. It was that characteristic that made it possible for the American people to be roused into an angry frenzy of revenge by the Bush cabal, and blinded by it, to support the destruction of a country that had nothing at all to do with 9/11.

Prison is the punishment but they don't allow torture - mental or physical.

Taht would mean that some rapists and murderers cam be fixed. The problem is how can you tell which ones?

I wonder if I break into Norway as an illegal alien, if they'll put me up in their prison!

an influx of foreigners trying to get into their prisons.

I don't think it would work. But I do think they might buy you a 1st class, one-way ticket back home.

Unlike prison in America where you come out worse than you started and have little to no chance of staying out.

and guide them away from recidivism, but there's a line crossed when inmates are afforded luxuries not available to the rest of the population (e.g. the sound studio). I'm reminded of how Ferndale Prison had a nine-hole golf course and let a convicted killer bring in his own horse to ride, when many ordinary people can't afford either one.


How many ordinary citizens live with less, don't have flat-screen TVs, and live in cramped apartments, yet pay their taxes to support this? While prison needs to be humane and constructive, let's not forget we're referring to drug dealers, murderers, and rapists.

There is just something intrinsically obscene and bizarre to me about treating offenders with more respect, humaneness, and consideration than they have treated their victims, or to accord them better living standards than many of the working poor they often victimize.

Would you rather have the sort of repeat offending rates associated with the u.s. model, just so you could feel happy knowing some criminals were suffering? I sort of think that the prison system should mainly be judged by how much it, like, stops crime, and makes me safer, but that's just me.

I don't think Norwegian prisoners have better standards of living than the Norwegian working poor.

I think a lot of people would actually be happy to have loads of murder and burglary in their society as long as they knew that criminals were suffering somewhere even if that suffering demonstrably helps to keep up crime rates. Seems like a pretty fucked up worldview to me.

I mean, we Americans are soft on the terrorism of Cheney's prison-industrial complex buddies.

Time to get Robespierre on their ass.

It does seem to work.

There are virtually no repercussions for doing even the worst of things.