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Monday, July 24th, 2017

North Dakota’s Norway Experiment

Author:     Dashka Slater
Source:     Mother Jones
Publication Date:     July/August 2017 Issue
 Link: North Dakota’s Norway Experiment
Stephan:   Here is what may be the change moment in an evil trend. If so it is wonderful news. The American gulag is one of our nation's great humiliations. We have 2.3 million people in the prison system, the largest incarcerated population in the world. We have thousands in solitary confinement, which amounts to continuous daily torture. Other nations, in this case notably Norway, have other far more successful approaches to incarceration. As in so many cases we know what works, we just have other priorities. Some are economic, whole towns depend on warehousing human beings for their daily bread. The entire system is a perversion based on greed and the pleasure of social sadism. It doesn't work, and it is astonishingly expensive. In contrast the Norewigean system works and is a faction of the cost. Another proof of the Theorem of Wellbeing. Here's the story.  

North Dakota prison

Late one night in October 2015, North Dakota prisons chief Leann Bertsch met Karianne Jackson, one of her deputies, for a drink in a hotel bar in Oslo, Norway. They had just spent an exhausting day touring Halden, the maximum-security facility Time has dubbed “the world’s most humane prison,” yet neither of them could sleep.

Halden is situated in a remote forest of birch, pine, and spruce with an understory of blueberry shrubs. The prison is surrounded by a single wall. It has no barbed wire, guard towers, or electric fences. Prisoners stay in private rooms with en suite bathrooms and can cook for themselves in kitchens equipped with stainless-steel flatware and porcelain dishes. Guards and inmates mingle freely, eating and playing games and sports together. Violence is rare and assaults on guards are unheard of. Solitary confinement is almost never used.

By this point, Bertsch had been in charge of North Dakota’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which includes four adult prisons and one juvenile facility, for more than a decade, and […]

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2 Comments

  1. Rev. Dean on Monday, July 24, 2017 at 6:12 am

    A very good story. I hope the states will adopt this type of system, despite Session’s old style rhetoric which obviously does not work to rehabilitate people, only to shame them and make them worse, not better citizens.

  2. sam crespi on Monday, July 24, 2017 at 9:17 am

    So many positive new programs being offered in prisons across the US for the last ten years. A slow, but much needed change. I love that they’re targeting the solitary confinement, which causes more damage than positive change.