The United States and Norwegian penal systems could not be more opposite from one another, according to American journalist Jessica Benko.
In Norway, the practice of capital punishment was banned in 1902 and life sentences were abolished in 1981; the maximum sentence for any crime is 21 years. In addition, unlike its American counterpart, the Norwegian correctional system is based heavily on rehabilitation.
An example is the construction of Halden Fengsel prison. Its perimeter is devoid of electric fences topped by razor wires. Nonexistent are the armed towers like those across prisons throughout the U.S.
Halden Fengsel houses some 251 of Norway’s 3,800 inmates and uses non-conventional approaches in a non-conventional setting.
Benko visited Halden Fengsel and describes the prison as “the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness.
“Better out than in” is an unofficial Norwegian Correctional Service motto. In 1998, Norway’s Ministry of Justice recalculated the goals and methodology of the Correctional Service, putting forth a new approach to rehabilitation and incarceration. It included education, job training, skills development and therapy.
Norway’s criminal justice system emphasizes rehabilitation and reintegration and assisting inmates with housing and job placement before they are released from prison.
Benko says of Halden, “Every aspect of the facility was designed to ease psychological pressures, mitigate conflict and minimize interpersonal friction.”
In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik attacked a government building in the capitol city, which resulted in hundreds of injuries, followed by a bloody massacre at a summer camp where 77 students died.
Due to magnitude of this crime, Breivik was sentenced to “preventive detention,” which means that after 21 years his sentence can be extended by five-years. These extensions can go on indefinitely if he is determined to be a danger to public safety.
Breivik is not at Halden Fengsel; he is in a high-security wing at Ila Prison (by himself in three rooms, according to his recent biography).
There are approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated in America’s prisons. The U.S. makes up 5 percent of the world’s population, and has 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated.
In a 1967 report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, concerns were raised about correctional facilities. “Life in many institutions is at best barren and futile, at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading…The conditions in which they live are the poorest possible preparation for their successful re-entry into society and often merely reinforce in them a pattern of manipulation and destructiveness.”
Robert Martinson, a sociology researcher at the City University of New York, authored a 1974 article in which he argues the rehabilitative effects of programs. He writes, “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.”
As a result of that report, several media organizations used Martinson’s claims to discredit rehabilitation in America’s prisons. California Gov. Jerry Brown, in 1975, said of rehabilitative programs, “They don’t rehabilitate; they don’t deter; they don’t punish, and they don’t protect.”
Critics quickly challenged Martinson’s “choice to overlook the successful programs and their characteristics in favor of a broad conclusion devoid of context.” Martinson published a new report in 1979 from new analyses that adamantly retracted his earlier summation.
He states in this report, “Contrary to my previous position, some treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism.” A 1984 Senate report demanding tougher sentencing guidelines cited Martinson’s 1974 report; however, Martinson’s retraction did not appear in the Senate report.
Norway’s Halden Fengsel, with its non-imposing architectural design and rehabilitative setting, represents a stark alternative to the retributive component in America’s criminal justice system.
Ragnar Kristoffersen, an anthropologist, quotes a verse thought to be by Dostoyevsky, “The degree of a civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
