Norway has some of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. Many believe the country’s rehabilitation-based approach to prison has helped prevent re-entry — a far cry from the cyclical nature of the criminal justice system in the United States. Things are going to get slightly tougher for some of Norway’s prisoners, and they aren’t very happy about it.
Norway sent about 25 prisoners to the Netherlands on Tuesday due to a lack of space in its own prisons. Many of the nearly 250 prisoners who will be sent to the Netherlands were made to shift, while some volunteered.
“It’s a very cushy prison, a pleasant prison,” Kenneth Vimme said of Norgerhaven, the Dutch prison to which he transferred.
Vimme, who is serving a 17-year sentence for murder, told a Norwegian television outlet that volunteered to make the move even though he complained that the prison in the Netherlands would have fewer TV channels than he enjoyed in Norway.
While prisoners serving long sentences will be allowed to plant vegetable gardens, raise chickens, cook their own food, and wander the pastoral prison grounds, they won’t have all of the same “luxuries” afforded to them in Norway’s famously lax prisons. The prison in the Netherlands, however, will be overseen by a Norwegian administrator and follow Norwegian codes, although its guards will be Dutch.
Vimme is among 79 prisoners who volunteered to make the move in the first phase of the transfer, but many other prisoners — and their families — have protested the move.
An association that represents the families of the prisoners said the move violates Norway’s “proximity principle” which gives inmates the right to serve time near their homes.
“To serve your sentence so far from home hurts your chances of rehabilitation in society and the possibility of family visits,” Hanne Hamsund, who heads the organization, told AFP.
He said that there are no direct flights or trains from Norway to the prison in the Netherlands, and estimated that it will not only take several hours, but also about $600 per person to visit a family member once transport and hotel costs are added.
In the U.S., the issue of proximity can be even worse. The Federal Bureau of Prisons only “attempts” to place prisoners “within a 500-mile radius of their release residence.” That distance that can be exceptionally difficult for families to traverse without robust public transportation options to higher security prisons, which are often located far from cities. There’s no regulatory order on the distance between prison placements and families despite the fact that the Bureau admitted that prisoners who are closer to their families have lower recidivism rates.
The promise to keep prisoners close to their families isn’t the only thing that makes prisons in Norway different than those in the U.S. Prisons in America tend to be overcrowded, violent, and even structurally unsound.
Prisons in Norway are idyllic resorts in comparison. Halden, one of Norway’s most accommodating prisons, includes chalet-style houses for prisoners to receive overnight visits from their family members. With individual rooms, original artwork on the walls, plenty of sports options which guards often join in on, a music studio, and a grocery store that stocks everything from wasabi paste to vanilla pods, Halden has acquired a reputation for being the world’s “most humane” prison.
That’s because Norway’s prisons operate on a very different framework than those in most countries, including the U.S.
There are no life sentences in Norway. The longest sentence a person can receive is 21 years, although that can be extended by five year increments indefinitely if authorities decide that the prisoner has not been rehabilitated.
That’s the sentence that Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a mass shooting and bombing received. Most Norwegians were satisfied with the sentence because of an overarching belief that the prison systems goal isn’t punishment, but rather rehabilitation.
Are Hoidal, who heads Halden prison, told the Guardian:
Everyone who is imprisoned inside Norwegian prisons will be released — maybe not Breivik, but everyone else will go back to society. We look at what kind of neighbor you want to have when they come out. If you stay in a box for a few years, then you are not a good person when you come out. If you treat them hard… well, we don’t think that treating them hard will make them a better man. We don’t think about revenge in the Norwegian prison system. We have much more focus on rehabilitation. It is a long time since we had fights between inmates. It is this building that makes softer people.
The emphasis on making prisoners “softer” through prisons that offer many of the amenities of real life — short, of course, of freedom — is costly.
Norway spends about $90,000 a year to house each prisoner. That’s three times as much as the U.S. spends. But its recidivism rates are among the lowest in the world at about 30 percent — half that of the U.S.
Lower rates of re-entry and shorter sentences could end up saving Norway in the long term.
And while there’s been a steady increase in the percentage of Norwegians who are incarcerated, it’s no where near that of the U.S. The U.S. puts people behind bars at 10 times the rate that Norway does.