Learning from Norwegian Prisons

Last month, I visited prisons in Norway with U.S. criminal justice philanthropy leaders and staff and leadership from prison systems in Washington State and Connecticut on a trip coordinated and led by Amend, a U.S. organization that works to reduce physical and mental health damage caused by prisons to staff and people incarcerated. Northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular have a reputation for low prisoner numbers and especially humane practices. I jumped at the chance to see in person what I had read so much about. I visited two prisons, and others may be different, but both were maximum security, so these aren’t just the rules for low level prisoners. Below are my notes on what I saw, and some reflections.

Before getting to the details, my bottom line takeaway is that Norway (specifically Norway, not all of Scandinavia) is as impressive as everyone says. I was prepared for it to be humane and well run, but I was really struck by the intense commitment to human dignity on the part of every staff person I encountered, and in the overall design of the facilities. Most importantly, guards are trained and selected for maximum commitment to social work and care, rather than brutalizing punishment. I believe that changing prison officer culture would be the most consequential change we could make, before even improving the buildings and programming.

How it works

There are ~3000 people in prison in all of Norway, including people in pre-trial. These people are housed in 33 prison units containing 58 distinct facilities. (Compare the U.S., where there are many prisons that could hold all of Norway’s prison population in one). At one prison we went to, ⅔ were sentenced and ⅓ were pretrial. A third of the prisoners were non-citizens. 45% of the guards were women. Not all prisons are as well equipped as the ones we saw. Halden prison in particular was especially expensive to build – here is a photo gallery of their facilities, from which I’ve drawn all the photos in this post – and we were told there isn’t appetite to do that again. They proudly told us that Norway has some of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, around 20%.

School, health, library, and dental services aren’t funded by the department of corrections. Instead, those services are funded and controlled from the outside. This creates accountability for the prison and ensures that there are always outside eyes looking in.

Prisoners are paid 85 Kroner a day ($8.43) if working or attending school. Work is five days a week, and prisoners are assigned based on their existing skills. For example, a person with experience in mechanics might work in the auto body shop, or someone with IT experience works in the prison library. There’s a Norwegian Labor and Welfare agency representative in the prison to make sure that work rules are respected. If they refuse to do either, they receive half pay. The men use this pay to buy their daily food for breakfast and lunch, which they prepare themselves in dorm kitchens. Food is sold in the prison commissary, a store that resembles a well-stocked bodega. I met a janitor in the prison library who said his specialty is baking cakes. Men on a dorm floor will pool resources to buy the necessary ingredients for the cakes.

Officers are required to do a free, two-year course at the university level before becoming a guard. After that, they have to commit to at least one year working in the prisons. The training is considered so excellent that other social services often poach guards. This is creating a problem for the prison system as they are losing staff faster than they can replace them. A solution here might be for those other services to compensate the prison system for at least one year of pay, or for the system to require guards to work at least two years before leaving. Either way, it’s striking that prison guards are considered so exceptionally well trained that they are in high demand for poaching.

Principles that guide the guards include: thinking of this as social work, seeking dialogue, offering guidance and respect, taking a humane perspective, and fostering leadership and cohesion. Officers “have the shoes on,” and are expected to take responsibility and accountability for what’s happening with prisoners. Any restraints must be applied in a bespoke way that fits the specific security concerns regarding the person. We were told there are no routines like strip searches, shackles, etc. Assaults on staff at the prisons we visited are rare, perhaps one every 1-2 months according to guards at one prison. Guards carry no weapons. They have pepper spray, but it’s locked up. They reported having to use it roughly once every four months. I didn’t get information on how much violence takes place between people incarcerated in the prisons, but I would be surprised if it happens often given the environment I saw.

Several staff mentioned that there are serious and increasing mental health challenges in the prisons. To respond to the complex needs of prisoners, they created two special teams within the prison guards, which require extra training. The “resource team” is charged with “breaking the cycle” of negative behavior on the part of prisoners. A contact officer on the resource team is both a social worker and a guard. The “activity team” staffs individual prisoners to ensure that men who are unable or unwilling to participate in work duty (due to fear of other prisoners or mental health issues) still make it out of their cells on a daily basis, as isolation is seen as the cause of enduring mental health problems. These guards may take daily walks with the men in their care, or do other activities together.

There is a strong emphasis on not only respecting dignity in the design of rooms, work assignment, guard interactions and so forth, but also in ensuring that prisoners maintain human contact. For example, prisoners in solitary must still have time out of their cells every day that involves interaction with others. Prisoners eat at a normal table with guards in their housing units. Even the ‘worst of the worst’ have this level of contact.

One of my most memorable conversations during this tour was with a Norwegian man in the prison who had been convicted in Sweden (for assaulting a man who was robbing him) and was allowed to transfer to a Norwegian prison after 6 months in the Swedish prison. He showed us his room, including photos of his children and an enormous and very regal cat. He emphatically attested to the better conditions, food, and treatment in Norway, saying Swedish prisons are terrible. The pay in Norway is 10x higher, prisoners get single rooms instead of being double bunked, and the food is better. I asked one of the guards what they thought of this, and they said that guards in Sweden receive much less training than in Norway, so that’s not surprising. Sweden also has a right wing government right now, which doesn’t support anything like Norwegian practices. Indeed, the Guardian reports that: “Sweden is moving away from criminal rehabilitation in favour of US-style mass incarceration… as the country prepares to rent places in Estonian jails to help house its rapidly expanding prison population.”

Regarding government support, we learned that budgets have been going down over the last several years for the prisons we visited, and as a result their staffing has been cut by 25%. This has resulted in less leeway in doing programming for prisoners, as everything requires a certain amount of staffing. So, the gleaming experience we saw was apparently the pared down version. They are still looking pretty good from what I could tell. My trip to Oslo coincided with the country’s high-stakes national elections, where there was the potential for a right wing take over in the government. The Labour government pulled through in the end, which is the best result for preserving the budgets and values commitment to keeping the Norway model going. Several guards I spoke to said they were hoping for Labour to win to ensure they could keep doing their work.

Further anecdotes

• On our first prison visit, the main courtyard between the dorms was spacious and green, with trees, bushes, some small hills, and a small bell tower. A warden from Washington state prison on our trip was excited about this, as he’s been trying to convince his security team to put some greenery in their yard. Normal prison procedures stipulate that there should be nothing at all, to ensure there aren’t any places to hide and that men can’t fashion weapons out of everything. He said he thought he could bring this design back home and implement it.

• The prison hallways were very quiet and we were reminded not to speak too loudly, as the guards want to respect the prisoners’ need for calm.

• The common refrain when looking into a prison cell is that it’s “like a dorm.” There’s a bed, a desk, a bathroom with a shower and a door that closes in the room. The furniture is made of wood. The windows are large, with views out to trees.

• We spoke to a man in charge of cutting firewood. He was doing his shift with no supervision. We asked permission before asking questions; no one was required to speak with us.

• We went to several large workshops over the course of two days: a vast metal working shop, two enormous wood shops, and a car mechanic shop. Each was fully equipped with all the necessary tools and heavy machinery for producing real products, such as furniture. There was no strict system for counting tools and men were moving freely throughout the space. The American prison staff on the tour were quite struck by this.

• I asked a guard if I could shake a man’s hand after I spoke to him about his work detail, and the guard didn’t understand my question. He said, “of course! Why not?” I was used to the idea of no contact rules that I’ve experienced in U.S. prisons.

• We visited the prison grocery store. A prisoner working in the store is getting a business degree in running a store. Everyone there was unpacking goods from a recent shipment. A female prison guard was also working hard right alongside the prisoners. She was putting her back into unpacking cans from their plastic wrap.

• We spent a while chatting to men in a beautiful and well equipped art and design studio.

• In the second prison we visited, the dorms are in a separate building from the work spaces. Men walk down the hill from their dorms each day to go to work. The prison director shared that this is part of their commitment to normalcy. People in the world leave home to go to work, so the men in their prison do that as well.

• We visited the ‘supermax’ unit, which was specially built for two prisoners who trade off the space when they come from their dorm upstairs. The two men are never in the space at the same time, and they don’t mix in the general population or go to work detail. They just move between their sleeping rooms and the general living area. Even this ultra high security zone contains a kitchen with knives, a waffle iron, kettle, and other implements, a living room, dining room where the guards eat with prisoners, and a small garden.

• Even though the facilities looked amazing to us, it’s still a prison. We spoke to men through a fence in a yard who said that it’s a “shithole.” We said we’re Americans, and he said oh yeah well you guys are worse. Regardless, the place certainly was not a “resort” in his eyes.

• Halden prison has a forest in the middle, with hundreds of slender short trees. It’s dense and thick and there’s a frisbee golf set up in the middle. Men are allowed in only for specific activities, or when taken by an activity officer on a walk.

• Both prisons I saw had quite well equipped overnight visiting houses, with a bedroom for adults, one for kids, a living room, kitchen, and a yard. Men have to take a parenting class before they can invite their families there, and the visiting houses are only for visits for men with children (others may visit in the regular visiting rooms).

• There were prison staff from Connecticut and Washington on our visit. Their eyes went wide seeing how well provisioned the kitchens are with things that would be totally banned in their facilities, like knives and heavy objects.

Reflection

The most notorious prisoner in Norway may be Anders Breivik, who gunned down 69 young people attending a summer youth camp in 2011. A staff member told us how this case massively tested the Norwegian system’s resolve. What should happen to this unrepentant mass murderer? Would they make a justified exception by unleashing vengeance on this especially horrible person? Or would they double down on their humanity. They chose the latter by building the specialized supermax unit described above.

In hearing this account, I was reminded of the Ursula Le Guin story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where a society conditions its immense peace and prosperity on the horrific treatment of an innocent child. Norway, by contrast, has committed to the opposite: they treat Brevic better than many people think any prisoner deserves to be treated, let alone the most vicious. This is not a guaranteed system - it’s frail. The budgets are being cut and plenty of people in Norway disagree with this approach. Other prisons in Norway may be less well equipped than the ones I saw, and it seems clear that non-citizens don’t get as much access to programming and education as citizens (and may be more likely to get longer sentences). But the prison leaders themselves are adamant that the way to best fortify Norwegian culture and society is to treat their prisoners with full dignity and humanity, and they are living up to that claim better than any system I’ve seen in the U.S.