Incarceration Practices based on the Restorative Justice Model successfully adopted in Scandinavia since the late 20th century or Tailored to Rehabilitation
Below is an extract from What is restorative justice? - The Norwegian American · Linn Chloe Hagstrøm -6 SEPT 2016:
Below is a snapshot of Chalk and Cheese - Australian vs. Norwegian Prisons published by Community Justice Coalition in 2017:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
At a prisons Reintegration in Australia in 2017, former NSW Inspector of Custodial Services, John Paget, said that the $3.8 billion expansion of NSW prisons, including 7,000 extra beds show “the expensive failure of public policy in Australia”.1 This perspective provides a useful starting point for comparing prison retributive expansion in Australia with the successful rehabilitative justice systems in Norway and The Netherlands.
This comparison could not have taken place in 1984 when the Norwegian and Dutch prison systems were clearly similar to that in Australia today. However, new policies in the Netherlands that focus on rehabilitation and promote a reduction in the crime rate have allowed the successful closure of several prisons throughout the country.
Australia’s justice system, however, is based on retributive and deterrence-based practices. Rates of re-offending are high, with approximately 45% of inmates returning to prison within just two years.2 Not only do high recidivism rates stretch prison resources and cause overcrowding, this rate of re-offending also increases the number of communities affected by crime.
The restorative justice models used in Norwegian and Dutch prisons have proven to reverse these negative effects and have created safer communities. A focus on education and social services better prepare inmates for life after prison and future social integration. Bastoy Prison governor and clinical psychologist, Arne Wilson, argues that prisons should simply deprive inmates of liberty, rather than provide inhumane conditions that prevent them from functioning as part of society post-release.
The Australian Prison System
The underlying principle governing the Australian penal system, in contrast to that of Norway’s and the Netherlands’ is retribution and deprivation. Australia has higher recidivism rates and is more focused on locking up offenders and punishing them than on keeping them out of the system and rehabilitating them.
NSW has the highest state prison population at 12,729 as of September 2016. This represents an increase of over 21% between 2014-2016.33 In NSW, 48% of inmates returned to prison within two years, contributing to the rise of the prison population.
Australia’s tough stance on crime is overcrowding the prison system and costing taxpayers approximately $3.8 billion a year. The issue is extensive, with reports of inmates sleeping on mattresses on the floor and in foldout beds in Queensland, Victorian and South Australian facilities. Overcrowding results in increased violence inside prisons, amongst prisoners themselves and between prisoners and guards.34 As the NSW Auditor-General’s Report notes in 2015, “overcrowding of correctional centres can negatively impact all aspects of custodial life, and ultimately result in higher re-offending rates”.35
In NSW, a reported decrease in crime rates was accompanied by a 7% increase in prison population, highlighting the dismal failure of imprisonment as an effective deterrent. Furthermore, contrary to the NSW Department of Corrective Service’s goal of reducing adult rates of re-offending by 5% by the year 2019, the rate of adult re-offending has continued to climb.36 The NSW Auditor-General’s Report found a 35.9% rate of recidivism within one year of release in 31 December 2013.
This rate of re-offending notably increased to 45.8% by 30 June 2014, within two years of release. These rates are not limited to NSW and, as shown below, demonstrate a national upward trend in adult re-offending, a clear indication that the prison system is not achieving the aim of reducing recidivism. This is further elucidated by the national imprisonment rate increasing by 6% over the 2015-16 period.
The strain on prison infrastructure and services has resulted in deteriorating prisoner health conditions and rising incidents of self-harm. As the inmate / parole officer ratio increases, the attempt to rehabilitate and reintegrate prisoners into society has become more difficult. In contrast, Dutch prisons employ numerous social workers, mental health professionals and lawyers to support prisoner rehabilitation.37
The consequences of overcrowding of prisons includes, but is not restricted to, reduced access to adequate support and education opportunities. The NSW prison system, for example, sometimes houses three inmates per two-man cell, with more than 50 inmates sharing a phone.38
Meanwhile, Queensland’s prison population increased by 20% in 2014 and 2015, resulting in 1,600 prisoners sharing cells.39 In the ACT, 46 detainees were housed in the 30-bed centre.40
In Victoria, prisoners were forced to sleep on foldout beds in common rooms and visiting areas for more than a year. The Police Union reported that overcrowding leads to an increase in prisoner tension, which means gaining the cooperation of prisoners is much more difficult. This has led to an increase in violence and escapes.41
In South Australia, a bed shortage was forcing “unsuitable prisoners” into the low and medium-security Mobilong Prison, which was a risk for prison guards.
In Western Australia, the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services has called for a new prison to be built as “the system is already unsustainably stretched.”42
According to Auditor-General, Tony Whitfield, overcrowding has undermined confidence in the justice system and the effectiveness of prisons. His report outlines the ineffectiveness of Corrective Service NSW’s (CSNSW) performance framework.43 Specifically, from 2014-15, only five of 12 organisational targets of public correctional centres were met. Targets that were not met include no prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and eight hours’ time out of cells for inmates in secure facilities.44
In response, the NSW government’s Better Prisons reform program, which commenced in March 2016, aims to address these issues. The program seeks to lift standards and strengthen accountability of prisons by requiring NSW prisons to meet performance targets. The project is designed so that rates of recidivism are reduced, community protection is increased, and prison standards are lifted.45
For example, under the program, the NSW government’s $3.8 billion investment over four years will create thousands of new beds for inmates in the state’s prison system in response to increasing inmate numbers. Already this has funded the delivery of an extra 1,500 beds within existing prisons.46 One can only ask why Australian governments focus on building prisons when Scandinavian governments are closing them. Is it because Australia’s convict past is genetically inheritable, or does it have something to do with prevailing cultural attitudes?
CONCLUSION
The comparisons between Australian and British prisons with Norwegian and Dutch prisons have elicited some insights and areas for improvements for the Australian prison system. Australia and Britain could embody the principles underlying Norway and the Netherlands’s treatment of prisoners to firstly, increase prospects of reintegration into communities upon prisoners’ release, and secondly, to lower recidivism rates after release.
The Norwegian and Dutch prisons’ commitment to restorative justice and reintegration can be observed by the many facilities prisoners are afforded in prison. The provision of educational resources, training and skills building programs have promoted and sustained change and rehabilitation during and after prisoners’ sentences.
The close proximity of Norwegian and Dutch prisons to prisoners’ local communities limits the negative emotional distress that comes from adjusting to prison conditions. The success of their less punitive “pleasant-prison” philosophy can be observed by the 10% recidivism rate.
Conversely, the terrible and arguably inhumane conditions of Australian prisons, and the lack of facilities and programs that may promote change for prisoners, has resulted in a 60% recidivism rate, with 48% of convicted NSW offenders returning to prison two years after release.
Furthermore, the “tough on crime” stance of Australian authorities has led to overcrowding in Australian prisons, which have in turn led to escalated violence and rioting inside prisons.
As a result of overcrowding, prisoners have less access to adequate support, education and rehabilitation opportunities.
This vicious circle highlights the limits of Australian and British correction models.
The limits to vote, and restrictions on employment, housing and public assistance mean that Australian and British prisoners are not engaged with their communities.
Therefore, the prospects of their successful rehabilitation and reintegration after release are limited. This increases rates of recidivism.
In the Netherlands and Norway’s prisons the belief that prisoners should be treated as much as possible like normal civilians is a prime reason for their low incarceration and recidivism rates.
Australia has much to benefit by adopting the practice, policies and philosophy of the Norwegian and Dutch penal systems.
Below is a snapshot of Why Scandinavian Prisons Are Superior - Sep 24, 2013 by Doran Larson, professor of English at Hamilton College and the editor of Fourth City: Essays From the Prison in America.
'Open' prisons, in which detainees are allowed to live like regular citizens, should be a model for the U.S.
Suomenlinna Island Prison
Suomenlinna Island has hosted an “open” prison since 1971. The 95 male prisoners leave the prison grounds each day to do the township’s general maintenance or commute to the mainland for work or study. Serving time for theft, drug trafficking, assault, or murder, all the men here are on the verge of release. Cellblocks look like dorms at a state university. Though worse for wear, rooms feature flat-screen TVs, sound systems, and mini-refrigerators for the prisoners who can afford to rent them for prison-labor wages of 4.10 to 7.3 Euros per hour ($5.30 to $9.50). With electronic monitoring, prisoners are allowed to spend time with their families in Helsinki. Men here enjoy a screened barbecue pit, a gym, and a dining hall where prisoners and staff eat together. Prisoners throughout Scandinavia wear their own clothes. Officers wear navy slacks, powder-blue shirts, nametags and shoulder bars; but they carry no batons, handcuffs, Tasers or pepper-spray. The assistant warden who has led Linda and me around, Timo, looks like a wizened roadie: graying beard, black vest and jeans, red shirt, biker boots, and a taste for slim cigars.
One might wonder just where is the “prison” part of this Scandinavian open prison. Where are the impenetrable barriers? The punishing conditions that satisfy an American sense of justice?
First, an important caveat: Nordic prisons are not all open facilities. Closed prisons here date to the mid-19th century, copied from Philadelphia’s Eastern State, or New York’s Auburn, back when those prisons represented models of humane treatment. To an American eye, these prisons look like prisons: 10-meter walls, cameras, steel doors. I’ve heard men describe Scandinavian closed-prison conditions in ways that echo those of the American prison where I have led a writing workshop since 2006: officials intent on making life onerous, long hours in lockup, arbitrarily enforced rules.
Yet inside the four high-security prisons I’ve visited in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, common areas included table tennis, pool tables, steel darts, and aquariums. Prisoner art ornamented walls painted in mild greens and browns and blues. But the most profound difference is that correctional officers fill both rehabilitative and security roles. Each prisoner has a “contact officer” who monitors and helps advance progress toward return to the world outside—a practice introduced to help officers avoid the damage experienced by performing purely punitive functions: stress, hypertension, alcoholism, suicide, and other job-related hazards that today plague American corrections officers, who have an average life expectancy of 59.
This is all possible because, throughout Scandinavia, criminal justice policy rarely enters political debate. Decisions about best practices are left to professionals in the field, who are often published criminologists and consult closely with academics. Sustaining the barrier between populist politics and results-based prison policy are media that don’t sensationalize crime—if they report it at all. And all of this takes place in nations with established histories of consensual politics, relatively small and homogenous populations, and the best social service networks in the world, including the best public education. Standing outside a Nordic closed prison, the American son would have felt perfectly at ease. But inside, northern Europe’s closed facilities operate along the lines of humanism that American prisons abandoned early, under a host of pressures -- such as overcrowding, the push to make prisons profitable by contracting out collective labor, the use of unpaid prisoners as private farmhands, and, since 1973, the rise of an $80 billion mass incarceration industry. There is also the matter of scale. The prison population of Sweden (6,900) is less than half the population of Rikers Island at its height (14,000). Several prisons in the U.S. each hold nearly twice the prison population of Finland. This is not simply the difference between large and much smaller countries. U.S. incarceration rates are the highest in the world, about 10 times those throughout Scandinavia, which are among the world’s lowest.
In 1993, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie (a major influence on Scandinavian penal policy) had already unpacked this phenomenon. In Crime Control as Industry, Christie concluded that the more unlike oneself the imagined perpetrator of crime, the harsher the conditions one will agree to impose upon convicted criminals, and the greater the range of acts one will agree should be designated as crimes. More homogeneous nations institutionalize mercy, which is to say they attend more closely to the circumstances surrounding individual criminal acts. The opposite tendency, expressed in mandatory sentencing and indiscriminate “three strikes” laws, not only results from, but widens social distance. The harshness of the punishment that fearful voters are convinced is the only thing that works on people who don’t think or act like them becomes a measure of the moral distance between these voters and people identified as criminals.
Author Kenneth E. Hartman has lived inside California prisons for over three decades. In an essay in the forthcoming book, Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, he speaks to why that system sees 75 percent of all repeat parolees back within three years:
Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues far too often bordering on the pathological. The vast majority has never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education or even an opportunity to look at themselves as humans. Had any of these far less draconian interventions been tried… no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives. We internalize the separation and removal, the assumed less-than status, and hold up the idiotic and vainglorious pride we pretend to, like clown’s make-up, to hide our shame. In the end, the vast majority of us become exactly who we are told we are: violent, irrational, and incapable of conducting ourselves like conscious adults. It is a tragic opera with an obvious outcome. Nothing else works is not a statement of fact; it is the declaration of an ideology. This ideology holds that punishment, for the sake of the infliction of pain, is the logical response to all misbehavior. It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interest groups hide.
Though white, Hartman echoes the observations of the same Black Power prison writers of the 1960s and ‘70s, whose insights helped inspire white backlash: Convicted criminals bring to prison issues that devolve directly from poverty and poverty’s traumatic fallout: broken and abusive homes, communities and schools; mental illness, alcoholism, and addiction. Rather than remediating the effects of these issues, prisons tend to institutionalize them.
Those of us in the virtually prison-immune demographics also fail to credit convicted people with the simple capacity to see and understand where they are. No imprisoned American has to be told she has been left to the whims of under-screened and under-trained staff, most of whom are also from impoverished circumstances. They see staff rewarded with promotion for harsh treatment of prisoners and on the way to solid pensions. They know that it doesn’t matter what potential for shame, for self-castigation, penitence, or desire to make amends resides inside any American prisoner. Parole decisions are made by political appointees who watch the backs of their patrons. The system itself breeds cynical resentment. Witnessing the humiliation, racism, and physical assault perpetrated against prisoners—by staff, or tolerated between prisoners—can overfill the psychological space where reflection and self-searching might occur.
Now imagine yourself in a prison that commands a view from a tourist brochure. Your cell phone lies on a shelf, next to a TV and CD player, inside a prison that lets you go to paid work or study. There is no perimeter wall. Prison staff will help you with free-world social services to cover a missed month’s rent on your family’s apartment. Another will help you look for work, or for the next stage of education. Imagine yourself a prisoner who knows he is in prison for what he did, not because of his color or class, or because, lacking the resources for a proper defense, he plea-bargained under threat of near-geological years of incarceration. But also imagine living on this lovely island knowing, every minute of every day, that this is not your home, these people are not your family, your friends, your children, and you are always one misstep from a cell in a closed prison. You have strict curfews. In town you carry an electronic anklet. Yet nothing here feels unfair or unreasonable. You have, after all, committed a crime serious enough to make a range of other remedies untenable. Nothing you can see or touch or smell or taste, and no interaction with staff gives you anything to blame or resent about the system that brought you here.
This is the polished glass nightmare. Every emotional discomfort, every moment of remorse that you might try to cover with resentment of the system, everything you try to grip onto to crawl away from personal responsibility slides back into the pit of the self. Judges and prosecutors are unelected professionals who are under political pressure only to minimize prison populations. The message everywhere you look and walk is the same. You did this to yourself. You sit in a university classroom, but you harbor a secret. You are not like the others. On the way to work, you walk along a lovely sea wall, among kids and adults on holiday, but you know you are not free. You look like them; they never raise an eyebrow at you. But you know. You are under quarantine, and the disease is the past you made for yourself. Everything is being done to help and prepare you to clear this secret and live again like others. But the weight, finally, rests with you. This truly existential weight is implicit in the principle of normality, which is practiced throughout Scandinavian prisons: “The punishment is the restriction of liberty; no other rights have been removed,” reads a fact sheet on criminal services in Norway. “During the serving of a sentence, life inside will resemble life outside as much as possible. You need a reason to deny a sentenced offender his rights, not to grant them. Progression through a sentence should be aimed as much as possible at returning to the community. The more closed a system is, the harder it will be to return to freedom.”
One has to wonder if 10 years in such a glass funnel, directing all shame, anger and recrimination back onto oneself is not a morally harsher sentence than twice that time inside a 24-hour war zone where some of the most powerful warriors wear state uniforms, where family visits are made into scenes of collective humiliation, and where the few rehabilitative programs are run either by other prisoners or by unionized staff who suffer even less scrutiny than guards.
Inside U.S. prisons, decades can be filled with the labor of simple survival. Reflection upon the decisions that brought anyone to confinement must overcome the bitterness evoked by a system that sustains such an environment.
I’ve heard older men describe how they came in cocky, then grew into shame and remorse. Yet their regret is regularly overshadowed by anger against the arbitrary suffering that the prison perpetrates. These older, wiser men, like Kenneth Hartman, know this is the toughest challenge inside. The chaos of the life that put them in prison eventually evolves into the self-understanding that comes with age and assuming the weight of their crimes. But then begins the daily labor of denying the prison its power to turn them into the animals it sees in condemned people. As Rutgers University professor of education, Benjamin Justice, and Yale Law professor Tracey Meares observe, the overt curriculum of the system is about fairness, due process, and protection of law-abiding citizens. But for the objects of policing and punishment, “the American criminal justice system offers…race- and class‐based lessons on who is a citizen deserving of fairness and justice and who constitutes a group of dangerous others deserving of severe punishment, monitoring, and virtual branding.”
For a forthcoming book and digital archive, over the past four years I have been soliciting, reading, and editing non-fiction essays by incarcerated Americans writing about their experience inside—essays from over half the states, by black, white, Latina/o, Native American, and Asian and Pacific Island prisoners; by men, women, and gender-variant prisoners; by first-timers and by people who were first locked up when Lyndon Johnson was president. Though many praise individuals who have helped them inside, not one essay among several hundred expresses the belief that the system exists at its current scale for any other reason than the tax-funded profits and jobs it provides.
Beatings and purely arbitrary punishment are the norm. Health care is poor when it is not dangerous. In many facilities, programs for addicts and alcoholics (who make up 85 percent of those convicted of violent crimes) are so inadequate that the names on waiting lists today will wait decades for help. And no matter the race of the writer, the racism within the system is assumed if not explicitly criticized. What political prisoner, reformer, and eventual California prison administrator Kate Richards O’Hare wrote in her book In Prison in 1923 remains true today: “…by the workings of the prison system society commits every crime against the criminal that the criminal is charged with committing against society.”
Scandinavian prisons are roughly as racially and ethnically homogeneous as American prisons: 70 percent of Nordic prisoners are ethnically white citizens; the other 30 percent are foreign-born (mostly from other EU countries).
In U.S. prisons, ethnic and racial minorities make up over 60 percent of the population.
The difference is that the majority of Scandinavian prisoners look like the majority—including the voting majority—outside. Laws, enforcement policies, and prison practices are those that the majority of citizens assume would work for themselves. Whatever other differences may exist between law-abiding families and people convicted of crimes, the prison system itself does not seek to widen the social distance between them.
Below are extracts from Why Norway's prison system is so successful - CHRISTINA STERBENZ - DEC 12, 2014, 11:45 AM
"In Norway, fewer than 4,000 of the country’s 5 million people were behind bars as of August 2014.
That makes Norway’s incarceration rate just 75 per 100,000 people, compared to 707 people for every 100,000 people in the US.
On top of that, when criminals in Norway leave prison, they stay out. It has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The US has one of the highest: 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years.
Norway also has a relatively low level of crime compared to the US, according to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The majority of crimes reported to police there are theft-related incidents, and violent crime is mostly confined to areas with drug trafficking and gang problems.
Based on that information, it’s safe to assume Norway’s criminal justice system is doing something right. Few citizens there go to prison, and those who do usually go only once. So how does Norway accomplish this feat? The country relies on a concept called “restorative justice,” which aims to repair the harm caused by crime rather than punish people. This system focuses on rehabilitating prisoners.
Norway adopts a less punitive approach than the US and focuses on making sure prisoners don’t come back. A 2007 report on recidivism released by the US Department of Justice found that strict incarceration actually increases offender recidivism, while facilities that incorporate “cognitive-behavioural programs rooted in social learning theory” are the most effective at keeping ex-cons out of jail.
To those working within Norway’s prison system, the short sentences and somewhat luxurious accommodations make complete sense. As Are Hoidel, Halden Prison’s director, puts it: “Every inmates in Norwegian prison are going back to the society. Do you want people who are angry — or people who are rehabilitated?”
Below is an extract from Why the U.S. Needs to Start Paying Attention to Sweden's Remarkable Prison System Jan. 27, 2015:
"In an insightful article in the Atlantic, Doran Larson explains how his research on prisons revealed that Nordic countries' rehabilitative ethos produces tangible results for those countries. Even in the high-security prisons he visited in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, he observed some remarkable things:
Common areas included table tennis, pool tables, steel darts and aquariums. Prisoner art ornamented walls painted in mild greens and browns and blues. But the most profound difference is that correctional officers fill both rehabilitative and security roles. Each prisoner has a "contact officer" who monitors and helps advance progress toward return to the world outside — a practice introduced to help officers avoid the damage experienced by performing purely punitive functions.
Larson contends that open prison punishments can be more effective than closed prison punishments in that they don't distract the prisoner from the misdeeds that brought them there, as harsh American prisons often do."