This Is a Prison?

The Daily Mail (U.K.) has a fascinating article about a prison on Bastoy Island in Norway which has the lowest recidivism rate in Europe.

...It is a curious place. There are no secluded holiday homes or elegant hotels with moorings for passing yachts. The 120 people who live there never visit the mainland, but then why would they?

They spend their days happily winding around the network of paths that snake through the pine forests, or swimming and fishing along the five miles of pebble beaches, or playing on the tennis courts and football pitch; and recuperating later on sunbeds and in a sauna, a cinema room, a band rehearsal room and expansive library.

Their commune has handsomely furnished bungalows with cable TV. The residents eat together in an attractively spacious canteen thoughtfully decorated with Norwegian art. The centrepiece is a striking 10ft long model of a Norwegian merchant ship....an extensive new study undertaken by researchers across all the Nordic countries reveals that the reoffending average across Europe is about 70-75 per cent. In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the average is 30 per cent. In Norway it is 20 per cent. Thus Bastoy, at just 16 per cent, has the lowest reoffending rate in Europe.

...'Both society and the individual simply have to put aside their desire for revenge, and stop focusing on prisons as places of punishment and pain. Depriving a person of their freedom for a period of time is sufficient punishment in itself without any need whatsoever for harsh prison conditions.

'Bastoy takes the opposite approach to a conventional prison where prisoners are given no responsibility, locked up, fed and treated like animals and eventually end up behaving like animals.

'Here you are given personal responsibility and a job and asked to deal with all the challenges that entails. It is an arena in which the mind can heal, allowing prisoners to gain self-confidence, establish respect for themselves and in so doing respect for others too,' [says prison governor Arne Kvernvik Nilsen]...

With 120 inmates and 70 staff (35 of whom are guards) Bastoy is Norway's largest low-security prison but it is one of four others dotted around the country. The governor claims that it is his goal of self-sufficiency that both creates jobs for prisoners and provides them with a common purpose.

'The prison is self-sustaining and as green as possible in terms of recycling, solar panels and using horses instead of cars. It means that the inmates have plenty to do and plenty of contact with nature - the farm animals, wildlife, the fresh air and sea. We try to teach inmates that they are part of their environment and that if you harm nature or your fellow man it comes back to you.'

He adds that a significant advantage of the ecological approach is that due to low staffing levels and producing their own food and fuel, Bastoy is actually the cheapest prison to run in the whole of Norway.

'We have a price for each prison bed in this country and we are much cheaper to run than a conventional closed prison....'

EDITORIAL NOTE: Perhaps this could serve as a model for a humane psychiatric facility. We have seen how the criminalization of mental illness didn't work 250 years ago, and does nothing for the patient today. Expect spirited resistance from the prison-industrial complex, which regards the inmate population as a revenue stream and has a vested interest in growing that population by any means possible.