Looking at the clock, I tell my two inspector hosts that I could sit and listen to their progressive wisdom all day, but I have a train to catch.
“No, no,” Lasse insists. “There is more to see. I will drive you to take the later train.” It’s the first time I’ve ever clamored to get out of a prison; usually I’m negotiating for more access to get in.
The sun is beginning to set through the pine trees as Lasse, slipping me a DVD of Freedom: The Musical, last year’s theater production, walks me around Halden’s perimeter. He clearly wants to show me every square inch of this place: the restaurant school; the luminous studio where Criminal Records, the music label, is housed; the high-end landscaping class, making lovely calendars featuring photos of their work; the gift shop, where I’m presented with a Halden cookbook; the print shop, with its flat-screen Mac computers.
“So, how do you like?” Lasse sweetly nudges. “What do you feel?”
What I feel, actually, is tired. Literally and metaphorically. Tired of prison tours, which leave me in the horrible position of ogling human beings. Tired of prisons themselves, because they’re always sites of woe. I don’t say this to my affable host, though. Instead I ask him one question. Why? Why would Norway spend all this money on this grandiose, over-the-top palace of a prison, especially when the country’s other prisons don’t measure up?
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “They wanted to try.”
They succeeded, I think. It’s almost as if Halden is a statement, meant to provoke the world, just as Lasse wants to provoke me: Look how we treat our criminals. Shame on you for not doing the same. It’s the opposite of the deterrence approach, which tries to scare people with atrocious hellholes—an approach we know doesn’t work, anyway. Instead, Halden is Norway’s way of boldly proclaiming its commitment to corrections over punishment. Of declaring that if the measure of a civilization is the quality of its justice system, Norway can be proud.
“Maybe we will not be able to sustain the upkeep, though,” Lasse says. “Look”—he points to the Mac computer. “These are already beginning to rust. How will it look in five years?”
“I don’t think it really matters,” I reply. The conditions are material, almost symbolic. The real innovation of Halden, of Norway’s prisons altogether, is the humane ideology behind them. Relations, as the other inspector had underscored.
As we drive to the train station, Lasse says, “Come, let me show you the prison where I worked for twenty-six years, before here.” He points to a village prison, containing twenty-five people.
“And here is just like the town where I live,” he goes on. “Small town, quiet. Houses all look the same.” Suddenly, at the roundabout, a car almost cuts us off.
“People drive so fast nowadays,” Lasse scoffs, pulling into the train station. “So selfish. Only think about themselves.”
His words ring in my ears during the ride back to Oslo. For two and a half hours I gaze out the window, lost in the vista and my thoughts. Norway’s loveliness is of such a radically different sort than that of the tropical places I’m accustomed to loving. It’s not peacock beauty but a soft winter wonderland, still and unassuming. The world has turned black and white, and I realize that I don’t miss the color. Maybe, in fact, the world doesn’t need so much color. Sameness need not be stultifying; it can be soothing, humbling, embracing.
And perhaps the essence of Norway lies in the beautiful evenness of this landscape. I’ve learned the Norwegian term likhet, which means both equality and sameness; the magnificent reward of one is born of the other. It’s likhet, too, that undergirds the principles of justice here: you are equal to and the same as everyone else, even if they have committed a crime and you haven’t.
There’s another rich term here, Jantelloven. I first heard it from a woman I’d chatted with in Oslo, in the lounge of a trendy new hotel. She’d been praising the hotel for being bold and different and flagrantly fabulous, something people often shy away from in this egalitarian society. There’s this notion of Jantelloven, she’d explained: a condescending attitude toward individuality and personal success. You’re not to think you’re special or better than anyone else.
“That’s a wonderful concept!” I’d exclaimed. The woman glared at me.
“What’s wonderful about that? It’s a way of keeping you down.”
The next day, during my visit to the staff academy, I’d brought up the conversation with the head of research, Berit Johnsen. All morning she’d been quietly wowing me with her ideas and stories, even given me a copy of her book, Sport, Masculinities and Power Relations in Prison. I’d flipped through the volume in awe; with its Foucault citations, complex gender analysis, ethical considerations, and political commitments, could this book really have been written by someone in corrections? Like everyone else I’d met in the field here, she was clearly a true intellectual; our conversation thus extended well beyond the realm of facts and figures and into philosophical analysis.
“I know what that woman meant,” Berit had said. “Jantelloven can be a way of saying, ‘Just stay in your lane.’ ”
“But,” I said, getting excited, “it’s also the perfect antithesis of American individualism. The selfishness of capitalism. All about me, me, me.”
“That’s the optimistic way to see it,” she’d acknowledged. “Here, a poor woman does go to the same hospital as a rich woman. There are state-run banks lending us money for education so we can all achieve education. There is something called dugnad, which is the tradition of volunteerism, communitarianism. We have a culture of work and labor, because work is your entrée to a welfare society. If you’re not working, you’re alone, outside society. To want to be a housewife with a rich husband is a foreign notion to us here. Everyone wants to work, to belong to the community.”
Lately, though, she’d gone on to say, a troubling cultural shift has taken place.
“Now we have a generation of people who want to be celebrities. Be special. But not everyone can be a celebrity. Who will do the cleaning? Teach in the schools? Where are the Norwegians nowadays? Sitting in offices thinking they’re exceptional. What we need to teach children is that being an ordinary citizen is great—it makes you part of something that’s bigger than you.”
A healthy dose of Jantelloven might be not just what Norway needs, but what the world needs. Jantelloven has no room for mass incarceration. Rife, rampant individualism, the stuff of which capitalism is made, is what undergirds prisons—the idea that it’s all about me, over and above my neighbor, over and above my society as a conjoined entity. But if instead I value my community, my society, over and above my self, then I cannot cruelly punish another; I innately know that he is me and I am she and we are all in this together. My triumphs are not mine but his; her failures, her crimes, are also mine. This is our sameness. We are bigger than I.
———
On my final day in Oslo the snow starts falling. I don’t mind the wet chill; the flakes paint an exquisite picture, dusting old buildings and brightening up shadowy streets. I sit in a seminar room at the University of Oslo, surrounded by scholars. Norway has a rich tradition of critical criminology, more deeply philosophical than the scientific, evidence-based research prized in US academies. Most famous in this vein is Professor Nils Christie, who’d responded to the introductory e-mail I’d sent him with an invitation to give a talk to faculty. I’d jumped at the chance. Professor Christie is my criminal justice guru. His work on restorative justice guided me through Rwanda and South Africa; his oeuvre, with its philosophical, poetic reflections on the nature of a just society, stirs me immensely.
“Tell us, Baz,” he prompts, passing me a plate of gravlax and egg sandwiches. “What are your reflections on what you’ve seen here? And around the world?”
I explain that the trajectory of my prison journey took me from the broad to the specific, from rethinking overall concepts about revenge, forgiveness, and what “corrections” might mean, to more particular concerns l
ike women in prison and the horrors of solitary, to the very practical economics of prison, in Australia and Singapore. In all countries, I found that prisons were, to echo the famous Mandela quote that spurred my odyssey, spot-on mirrors of the society that creates them.
I look down at my notes. I’d planned a long meditative talk about what I think I’ve learned in two years of global journeys, and that talk begins with three premises.
One, our goal should be the very simple one identified by Professor Christie in his book Limits to Pain: “Inflict as little pain as possible.” As he so eloquently says, life holds no shortage of sorrow. We need not add more by erecting hells.
Two, it’s incumbent on us to zero in on social systems over and above individual actions. Since their inception, prisons have been political and economic tools manipulated by the greedy, power-hungry few; from country to country, I’ve witnessed this reality. As South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and the United States have especially hammered home, our choices are thus conditioned by social forces, structural racisms, historical inequalities, even biology. In response, we must cultivate what British philosopher Jonathan Glover calls intellectual binocularity, which means thinking of ourselves and others as simultaneously subjects who act and objects who are acted upon, whose successes and failures are the product of manifold forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with us. That we cannot claim full credit for either our successes or our failures should both humble us and make us kinder. It should foster more talk of reforming structures as opposed to people.
Three, the burden of proof is not on us but on them. It should not fall on those who oppose incarceration as a response to crime but those who support it. Because if any other system had a 60 percent failure rate—that’s the US recidivism rate, and in much of the world the numbers don’t look much better—we’d dismantle that system right away and go right back to the drawing board. So the conversation ought not to begin with alternatives to incarceration; incarceration should be the last resort, used only when more successful measures don’t work. Consider the American professor Michael Tonry’s likening of prison to a medicine that cures one ailment while causing another. Also consider what iconic activist-scholar Angela Davis calls “abolition democracy.” Like emancipation, which called for both ending slavery and building new institutions to replace it, the end of prisons is not merely a process of tearing down but of building up. “Prison abolition,” Davis writes, “requires us to recognize the extent that our present social order—in which are embedded a complex array of social problems—will have to be radically transformed.” This process involves “re-imagining institutions, ideas, and strategies, and creating new institutions, ideas and strategies that will render prisons obsolete.”
Surveying the countries I’ve visited, such “re-imaginings” might be classified under three headings: before prison, during prison, and after it. Before is most vital. We cannot use the penal system as an alternative to social welfare. All countries must do more to address conditions that lead to crime, to prevent the need for prison altogether. To do this, they must, for one, reduce unemployment and inequality; it’s been proven that countries with high levels of income inequality have homicide rates nearly four times higher than more equal societies. Norway and its welfare state is obviously a model here, but so is a term that’s gained currency in the United States lately and has been put into practice in more than half its states. “Justice reinvestment” means spending the 54 billion that America spends on prisons on rebuilding human resources and infrastructure in neighborhoods ravaged by mass incarceration.
Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging, as we do in health care, that prevention is worth far more than cure. Community policing and smart policing should replace repressive tactics like those in Jamaica and Brazil, South Africa and America. And when it comes to drug addicts and the mentally ill, the two populations filling prisons worldwide, we need to take radically different approaches in order to freeze the flow. Repeal the kind of mandatory penalties and harsh “one size fits all” punishments in effect from the United States to Singapore and Thailand—and even here in Norway, where I met one young man serving sixteen years for heroin use. Many US states have already begun this process, relaxing mandatory minimums and expanding judicial discretion to divert drug offenders. In 2011 the Global Commission on Drugs, a panel of world leaders including former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, declared that the “global war on drugs has failed”; the essence of this failure is its focus on punishment, not prevention or treatment. The commission recommended some legalization, and regulation instead of prohibition. We should follow Europe’s lead, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, countries I didn’t visit because their successes are already so well documented; they focus on minimizing the hazards of drug use and emphasize health care, prevention, treatment, and regulation. And when it comes to the mentally ill, the approach should center on psychiatric hospitals, not prisons. As in the Netherlands, defendants should be dealt with by a multidisciplinary team including a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, behavioral therapist, and lawyer or judge.
When other crimes do occur—and we should not distinguish between “violent” and “nonviolent” crimes, since the morality of punishment is profoundly questionable with regard to any sort of wrongdoing—our goal should be to think restoratively. Here the lessons of Rwanda and South Africa are rich. So are the studies of European corrections, where only a small percentage of people convicted are sentenced to prison (6 percent in Germany and 10 percent in the Netherlands). Instead there are fines, mediations, community service, and suspended sentences, akin to probation. The Netherlands, where courts are required to give special reasons whenever a custodial sentence is ordered instead of a fine, uses “transactions”—by which a person who commits a crime pays the treasury or fulfills financial conditions or participates in a training course—and “task penalties,” reminiscent of Rwanda’s TIG sentences, involving a work order that benefits the community. Here in Norway there’s a move toward using electronic monitoring in lieu of prison for all sentences under four months.
After this radical social reform, though, there will still be people who cannot live in a free society because they pose a threat to it. And people whose actions demand that they be removed from the community for a period of time in order to be corrected, and then make reparations. For this latter group we might create an entity that is so unlike a prison as to be called something else entirely—an intervention, perhaps. It will operate in some ways like the prisons of old, as a transitory space that promotes healing; victims can process their pain and assess their needs while offenders, held captive, address what they’ve done.
In the intervention we can finally confront the self and its poor choices. And therefore in the intervention will live all the programming whose therapeutic value I’ve witnessed in Uganda, Jamaica, Thailand, Norway, America, Australia, Brazil, South Africa. There will be drama, music, reading and writing, restorative justice seminars—in other words, genuine rehabilitation and “restoration,” which, as Professor Christie notes in his book A Suitable Amount of Crime, comes from an Old Norse term referring to the rebuilding of a house’s foundation. As the Norwegian mantra goes, treat people like humans and they will be human. Family visits and home leave will of course be facilitated and encouraged, and residents given as much personal responsibility and agency as possible. Interventions will be subject to systematic ratings and universal standards. They will be transparent entities, not hidden lands of forgotten people, because we cannot own our institutions without laying eyes on them. As in education, size and staff will matter most; interventions will be small, attracting the sort of superb staff and healthy environment I saw here and in Australia. “It took a man like [Mandela] to free not only the prisoner but the jailer, too,” President Obama declared in his speech at Mandela’s funeral. Just as slavery dehumanizes the slave and the master both, a vicious prison system keeps staff and prisoners locked in hell tog
ether.
Few people should languish in interventions long; we should follow Norway’s lead in keeping sentences short. A 2014 report from the National Research Council on mass incarceration in the United States concluded that more severe sentences do not effectively deter crime; a 2012 Australian report affirmed the same thing. A lot of correction can happen in a relatively little amount of time, after which wrongdoers can begin the process of restitution.
When wrongdoers come home, they will not be subjected to the lifelong torture of being trapped in the prison of their former selves, which is the ultimate denial of humanity. Like Norway and unlike America, we should not provide the public with an easy online system by which past mistakes become permanent scarlet letters; criminal records will be accessible to the justice system, not ordinary citizens. Like Singapore, we will promote hiring of those who’ve passed through interventions; like New York State we’ll offer tax credits to businesses who do so, paying them more than the maximum of $2,400 that New York provides; like some US states we will deny employers the right to ask the criminal-history questions on application forms or in initial interviews. Most important of all, through ad campaigns, marketing, public discourse, and whatever else it takes, we will promote a culture that is not so risk-averse, but rather a climate of forgiveness and community. A culture that truly grasps these words by Russian novelist and former prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
This is the ambitious talk I had planned.
But I don’t give it. Instead, cowed by the presence of my guru, I offer some bland words about what I’ve seen in Norway and how unique it is, and how it lived up to many of my expectations.
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