Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  Halden is a textbook example of what you might call a ‘non-complementary prison’. Rather than mirroring the detainees’ behaviour, staff turn the other cheek–even to hardcore felons. In fact, the guards don’t carry weapons. ‘We talk to the guys,’ says one guard, ‘that’s our weapon.’2

  If you’re thinking this must be the softest correctional facility in Norway, you’re wrong. Halden is a maximum-security prison. And with some two hundred and fifty drug dealers, sexual offenders and murderers, it’s also the second largest prison in the country.

  If it’s a softer prison you’re after, that’s just a couple miles up the road. A short drive away is Bastøy, a picturesque island that houses 115 felons who are sitting out the last years of their sentences. What happens here is analogous to the BBC’s Prison Experiment, that yawn of a reality show that disintegrated into a pacifist commune (see Chapter 7).

  When I first saw pictures of this island, I could scarcely believe my eyes. Inmates and guards flipping burgers together? Swimming? Lounging in the sun? To be honest, it was difficult to tell the prison staff apart from the inmates. Guards at Bastøy don’t wear uniforms, and they all eat meals together, seated around the same table.

  On the island, there are all kinds of things to do. There’s a cinema, a tanning bed and two ski slopes. Several of the inmates got together and formed a group called the Bastøy Blues Band, which actually scored a spot opening for legendary Texas rockers ZZ Top. The island also has a church, a grocery store and a library.

  Bastøy may sound more like a luxury resort, but it’s not quite as laid-back as that. Inmates have to work hard to keep their community running: they have to plough and plant, harvest and cook, chop their own wood and do their own carpentry. Everything is recycled and they grow a quarter of their own food. Some inmates even commute off the island to jobs on the mainland, using a ferry service operated by the inmates themselves.

  And, oh yes, for their work, the men also have access to knives, hammers and other potential weapons of murder. If they need to fell a tree, they can use a chainsaw. Even the convicted killer whose murder weapon was–you guessed it–a chainsaw.

  Have the Norwegians lost it? How naive is it to sentence boatloads of murderers to a holiday resort? If you ask Bastøy’s staff, nothing could be more normal. In Norway, where 40 per cent of prison guards are women, all guards have to complete a two-year training programme. They’re taught that it’s better to make friends with inmates than to patronise and humiliate them.

  Norwegians call this ‘dynamic security’, to distinguish it from old-fashioned ‘static security’–the kind with barred cells, barbed wire and surveillance cameras. In Norway, prison is not about preventing bad behaviour, but preventing bad intentions. Guards understand it to be their duty to prepare detainees, as best they can, for a normal life. According to this ‘principle of normality’, life inside the walls should resemble as closely as possible life on the outside.

  And, incredibly, it works. Halden and Bastøy are tranquil communities. Whereas traditional penitentiaries are the quintessential total institutions–the kinds of places where bullying is rife (see Chapter 14)–in Norway’s prisons the inmates get along fine. Anytime conflicts arise, both sides must sit down to talk it out, and they can’t leave until they shake hands.

  ‘It’s really very simple,’ explains Bastøy’s warden, Tom Eberhardt. ‘Treat people like dirt, and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings, and they’ll act like human beings.’3

  Even so, I still wasn’t convinced. Rationally, I could understand why a non-complementary prison might work better. Intuitively, however, it seemed wrong-headed. How would it feel to victims, to know these murderers are being shipped off pleasantville?

  But when I read Tom Eberhardt’s explanation, it began to make sense. For starters, most inmates will be released sooner or later. In Norway, over 90 per cent are back on the streets in less than a year, so obviously they’re going to be somebody’s neighbour.4 As Eberhardt explained to an American journalist, ‘I tell people, we’re releasing neighbours every year. Do you want to release them as ticking time bombs?’5

  In the end, I reasoned, one thing matters more than anything else: the results. How do these kinds of prisons stack up? In the summer of 2018, a team of Norwegian and American economists got to work on this question. They looked at the recidivism rate–the chances someone will commit a repeat offence. According to the team’s calculations, the recidivism rate among former inmates of penitentiaries like Halden and Bastøy is nearly 50 per cent lower than among offenders sentenced to community service or made to pay a fine.6

  I was stunned. Almost 50 per cent? That’s unheard of. It means that, for every conviction, on average eleven fewer crimes are committed in the future. What’s more, the likelihood that an ex-convict will get a job is 40 per cent higher. Being locked up in a Norwegian prison really changes the course of people’s lives.

  It’s no coincidence that Norway boasts the lowest recidivism rate in the world. By contrast, the American prison system has among the highest. In the US, 60 per cent of inmates are back in the slammer after two years, compared to 20 per cent in Norway.7 In Bastøy it’s even lower–a mere 16 per cent–making this one of the best correctional facilities in Europe, perhaps even the world.8

  Okay, fine, but isn’t the Norwegian method phenomenally expensive?

  At the end of their 2018 article, the economists tallied the costs and benefits. A stay in a Norwegian prison, according to their calculations, costs on average $60,151 per conviction–almost twice as much as in the US. However, because these ex-convicts go on to commit fewer crimes, they also save Norwegian law enforcement $71,226 apiece. And because more of them find employment, they don’t need government assistance and they pay taxes, saving the system on average another $67,086. Last but not least, the number of victims goes down, which is priceless.

  Conclusion? Even using conservative estimates, the Norwegian prison system pays for itself more than two times over. Norway’s approach isn’t some naive, socialist aberration. It’s a system that’s better, more humane and less expensive.

  2

  On 23 July 1965, a commission of nineteen criminologists came together in Washington, D.C., convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their assignment: over the next two years, develop a radical new vision for the American law enforcement system, spanning everything from policing to detention.

  These were the turbulent 1960s. A new generation was pounding at the gates of power, crime rates were going up and the old criminal justice system was limping along. The criminologists knew it was time to think big. When they finally came out with their report, it contained more than two hundred recommendations. Emergency services needed an overhaul, police training needed to be stepped up and a national emergency hotline was needed–witness the birth of 911.

  But the most radical recommendations concerned the future of US prisons. On this, the commission didn’t mince words:

  Life in many institutions is at best barren and futile, at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading. […] the conditions in which they [inmates] live are the poorest possible preparation for their successful reentry into society, and often merely reinforce in them a pattern of manipulation or destructiveness.9

  It was time, said the commission, for total reform. No more bars, cells and endless hallways. ‘Architecturally, the model institution would resemble as much as possible a normal residential setting,’ advised the experts. ‘Rooms, for example, would have doors rather than bars. Inmates would eat at small tables in an informal atmosphere. There would be classrooms, recreation facilities, dayrooms, and perhaps a shop and library.’10

  It’s a little-known fact that the United States nearly built a prison system similar to what Norway has today. Initial pilots with this ‘new generation’ of prisons were launched in the late sixties. In these facilities, detainees had rooms of their own, with doors opening onto a common area where they could talk, read and play g
ames while an unarmed guard kept an eye on things. There was soft carpeting, upholstered furniture and real porcelain toilets.11

  Behold, said the experts: the prison of the future.

  In hindsight, it’s shocking how fast the tide turned–and what caused it. It started with Philip Zimbardo, who in February 1973 published the first academic article on his Stanford Prison Experiment. Without having ever set foot in a real prison, the psychologist asserted that prisons are inherently brutal, no matter how you dress them up.

  This verdict got a warm reception and gained popularity when the infamous Martinson Report appeared one year later. The man behind this report, Robert Martinson, was a sociologist at NYU with a reputation as a brilliant if slightly maniacal personality. He was also a man with a mission. In his younger years, Martinson had been a civil rights activist and landed in jail for thirty-nine days (including three in solitary confinement). This awful experience convinced him that all prisons are barbaric places.

  In the late sixties, shortly after completing his degree, Martinson was invited to join a big project analysing a wide range of correctional strategies, from courses to therapy to supervision, aimed at helping criminals get on the right track. Working alongside two other sociologists, Martinson gathered data from more than two hundred studies done all over the world. Their final report, spanning 736 pages, was unimaginatively titled The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies.

  Since complex studies like this were rarely read by journalists, Martinson also published a short summary of their findings in a popular magazine. Title: ‘What Works?’ Conclusion: nothing works. ‘With few and isolated exceptions,’ Martinson wrote, ‘the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.’12 The progressive social scientist hoped–much like Philip Zimbardo–that everyone would realise prisons were pointless places and should all be shut down.

  But that’s not what happened.

  At first the media couldn’t get enough of the charismatic sociologist. Newspapers and television programmes gave Martinson a platform to repeat his harsh verdict, while his co-authors stood by tearing their hair out. In reality, the results of 48 per cent of the studies analysed had been positive, showing rehabilitation can work.13

  The skewed summary of the Martinson Report cleared the way for hardliners. Here was the proof, proclaimed conservative policymakers, that some people are simply born bad and stay bad. That the whole concept of rehabilitation defies human nature. Better to lock up these bad apples and throw away the key, they declared. This ushered in a new era of tough, tougher, toughest, and pulled the plug on America’s experiment with a new generation of prisons.

  Ironically, Martinson retracted his conclusion a couple years later (‘contrary to my previous position, some treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism’).14 At a seminar in 1978, one astonished professor asked what he was supposed to tell his students. Martinson replied, ‘Tell them I was full of crap.’15

  By then, hardly anyone was listening. Martinson wrote one last article owning up to his mistakes, but only an obscure journal would run it. As another scientist observed, it was ‘probably the most infrequently read article in the criminal justice debate on rehabilitation’.16 Martinson’s rectification passed unremarked by the newspapers, radio and TV. And it also didn’t make the news when, a few weeks later, the fifty-two-year-old sociologist jumped from the fifteenth storey of his Manhattan apartment block.

  3

  By this point, someone else was making headlines: Professor James Q. Wilson.

  His name may not ring any bells, but if we want to understand anything about how the US criminal justice system arrived at the state it’s in today, there’s no getting around this man. In the years after Robert Martinson took his own life, James Wilson would change the course of American history.

  A political science professor at Harvard University, Wilson was the kind of guy with opinions about everything–from bioethics to the war on drugs and from the future of the constitutional state to scuba diving.17 (He also loved being photographed with twenty-foot sharks).18

  But the lion’s share of his life’s work centred on crime. If there was one thing Wilson hated, it was turning the other cheek. He had no use for the new generation of prisons that treated inmates with kindness. Exploring the ‘origins’ of criminal behaviour was a waste of time, he said, and all those liberals who yammered on about the effects of a troubled youth were missing the point. Some people are scum, pure and simple, and the best thing to do is lock them up. Either that or execute them.

  ‘It is a measure of our confusion,’ wrote the Harvard professor, ‘that such a statement will strike many enlightened readers today as cruel, even barbaric.’19

  To Wilson, however, it made perfect sense. His book Thinking About Crime (1975) became a big hit with top dogs in Washington, including President Gerald Ford, who in the year it was published called Wilson’s ideas ‘most interesting & helpful’.20 Leading officials rallied around his philosophy. The best remedy against crime, Professor Wilson patiently instructed, was to put away the criminals. How hard could it be?

  After reading a number of articles about James Q. Wilson’s influence on the justice system, it hit me. I’d heard this name before.

  Turns out that in 1982 Wilson came up with another revolutionary idea, which would enter the history books as the ‘broken windows’ theory. The first time I encountered this theory was in the same book where I’d also first read about Kitty Genovese’s murder (and the thirty-eight bystanders): journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

  I remember being riveted by his chapter on Wilson. ‘If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,’ Wilson wrote in a piece for The Atlantic in 1982, ‘all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.’21 Sooner or later, if nobody intervenes, the vandals will be followed by squatters. Next, drug addicts might move in, and then it’s only a matter of time before someone gets murdered.

  ‘This is an epidemic theory of crime,’ Gladwell observed.22 Litter on the sidewalks, vagrants on the street, graffiti on the walls: they’re all precursors to murder and mayhem. Even a single broken window sends the message that order is not being enforced, signalling to criminals that they can go even further. So, if you want to fight serious crime, you have to start by repairing broken windows.

  At first, I didn’t get it. Why worry about minor offences when people are getting murdered every day? It sounded–Gladwell conceded–‘as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the icebergs’.23

  But then I read about the first experiments.

  In the mid-1980s, New York City’s subways were covered in graffiti. The Transit Authority decided something needed to be done, so they hired Wilson’s co-author George Kelling as a consultant. He recommended a large-scale clean-up. Even trains with just a little graffiti were swiftly sent off to be scrubbed clean. According to the subway director, ‘We were religious about it.’24

  Then came phase two. Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory applied not only to disorder, but to the people who cause it. A city where beggars, hoodlums and panhandlers were allowed to roam at will was setting itself up for much worse. After all, as Wilson noted in 2011, ‘public order is a fragile thing’.25 Unlike many other scientists, he put little stock in investigating the structural causes of crime, such as poverty or discrimination. Instead he stressed that there’s ultimately only one cause that matters. Human nature.

  Most people, Wilson believed, do a simple cost-benefit calculation: does crime pay or not? If police are lax or jails too comfortable, it’s a sure bet more people will choose a life of crime.26 If crime rates rise, the solution is equally straightforward. You fix it with stronger extrinsic incentives like higher fines, longer jail time and harsher enforcement. As soon as the ‘costs’ of crime go up, demand will drop.

  One man couldn’t wait to put Wilson’
s theory into practice: William Bratton. And Bratton is the final linchpin in our story. In 1990, he was appointed the new chief of the New York City Transit Police. Bratton was a fervent believer in James Wilson’s doctrine. An energetic man, he was famous for constantly handing out copies of the original broken windows article published in The Atlantic.

  But Bratton wanted to do more than repair windows. He wanted to restore order in New York City, with an iron fist. As his first target, he picked fare evaders. Subway users who couldn’t present a $1.25 ticket from now on were arrested by transit cops, handcuffed and ceremoniously lined up on the subway platform where everyone could get a good look. The number of arrests made quintupled.27

  This merely whetted Bratton’s appetite. In 1994, he was promoted to city police commissioner, and soon all New Yorkers were getting a taste of Bratton’s philosophy. Initially, his officers were obstructed by rules and protocols, but Bratton swept them away. Now, anyone could be arrested for even the slightest infraction–public drinking, getting caught with a joint, joking around with a cop. In Bratton’s own words, ‘If you peed in the street, you were going to jail.’28

  Miraculously, this new strategy appeared to work. Crime rates plummeted. Murder rate? Down 63 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Muggings? Down 64 per cent. Car theft? Down 71 per cent.29 The broken windows theory once ridiculed by journalists turned out to be a stroke of genius.

  Wilson and Kelling became the country’s most esteemed criminologists. Commissioner Bratton made it onto the cover of Time magazine and went on to be appointed chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in 2002 and reappointed by the NYPD in 2014. He came to be revered by generations of police officers, who styled themselves ‘Brattonistas’.30 Wilson even credited Bratton with the ‘biggest change in policing in the country’.31