Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
04.19.2025
America’s experiment with Scandinavian-inspired jail items is rising — and being examined.
Two individuals play chess within the “Little Scandinavia” unit on the State Correctional Establishment-Chester in 2023 in Chester, Pa.
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When most individuals image U.S. prisons, they don’t normally think about inexperienced crops, vibrant murals, picket furnishings, cuddly canines or fish tanks. In most services, they’d be proper.
However at SCI Chester, a medium-security jail exterior Philadelphia, a small pilot unit generally known as “Little Scandinavia” is testing whether or not that sort of setting, modeled on the prisons of Nordic nations like Norway and Denmark, cannot solely change how prisons look, but additionally how they work.
The unit, opened in 2022, was created by way of a partnership between the state corrections division, Drexel College and the College of Oslo in Norway. Its premise is easy, if radical, by U.S. requirements: Prisons ought to primarily deal with getting ready individuals to efficiently reenter society — moderately than on punishment.
Final month, Pennsylvania corrections Secretary Laurel Harry introduced that the state would broaden its Scandinavian-inspired strategy to a few new services. The transfer got here after a randomized research at SCI Chester confirmed promising early outcomes. The unit has seen only a single bodily altercation since opening, and in line with Harry, employees have reported a better “sense of goal.”
“It’s a complete completely different vibe,” one man incarcerated within the unit informed Penn Reside final 12 months. “It’s extra of a group.” Officers within the unit are skilled to behave extra as mentors than as guards, and folks incarcerated there are inspired to construct casual relationships with employees in methods which are typically towards the principles or norms in typical jail environments.
California, in the meantime, is pushing forward with a extra financially formidable imaginative and prescient for Nordic-inspired jail reform. Whereas the 64-bed Chester unit price Pennsylvania simply $310,000 to arrange, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is spending practically 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} to remake San Quentin State Jail right into a Scandinavian-style “rehabilitation middle” to accommodate upwards of two,500 individuals. The rebranded facility will embrace vocational coaching hubs, a podcast studio, a farmer’s market and a self-serve grocery retailer. Building has already begun at San Quentin, and the unit is scheduled to open in January. The brand new facility represents a flashy centerpiece in a broader, system-wide shift towards rehabilitation, dubbed “the California Mannequin.”
Response to the San Quentin undertaking has been blended. One of the crucial outspoken critics of the trouble has been Steve Brooks, an incarcerated journalist on the jail. He wrote that even at its finest, the redesign wouldn’t scale to California’s huge jail system or meaningfully have an effect on most individuals inside it. Brooks argued the state ought to as an alternative be targeted on closing prisons and reinvesting the financial savings “in direction of reentry packages, job coaching, housing help, training grants, psychological well being assist, substance abuse remedy and extra,” a place echoed by some jail abolitionists when the query of Nordic-style prisons comes up.
Earlier this month, Brooks claimed in a private essay that his writing questioning the trouble in the end price him his job as editor-in-chief of the San Quentin Information.
Some victims’ rights teams have additionally come out towards the trouble, arguing that the state ought to as an alternative spend the cash on victims’ providers. The efforts have break up conservative observers, with some accusing liberal politicians of “placing criminals forward of law-abiding residents,” and others expressing assist. Noting that 95% of individuals in jail are in the end launched, columnist Steven Greenhut reasoned earlier this month: “If somebody from San Quentin moved into your neighborhood, would you need that particular person to have spent the previous 10 years combating for his life as a part of a skinhead gang or somebody who had spent the time attending courses, gardening, and taking part in ping pong?”
The state correctional union has provided guarded assist for the adjustments, regardless of the hesitation of the state’s correctional employees. Final week, the Sacramento Bee reported that employees buy-in stays the “largest impediment” to the rollout. Some corrections officers have alleged that the brand new freedoms awarded to incarcerated individuals “created extra harmful conditions.”
Different officers see main promise within the new California strategy. Officer Richard Kruse informed the Los Angeles Instances final summer season that he was “stoked” in regards to the adjustments and embraced a job on San Quentin’s “useful resource staff” to assist with the meant cultural shift. Kruse has embraced board and video video games as a instrument for modeling social habits. “They’re gonna depart sometime. That’s going to be your neighbor, is likely to be your member of the family’s neighbor,” Kruse informed the Instances. “These guys, if I can work with [them] to make [them] higher, that, to me, is what it’s about.”
In Connecticut — house to a different small-scale Nordic reform effort — supporters of the strategy counsel {that a} extra humane setting may have materials advantages for corrections officers. “You’re doing this for the incarcerated, however you’re additionally doing this on your colleagues,” coach Kevin Reeder says he tells skeptical officers, who discover it exhausting to shake the idea that jail “ought to really feel like a jail.” Reeder works with the nonprofit Amend, one of many main teams pushing to combine these sorts of fashions in U.S. prisons. He reminds the trainees that “they, too, do time” within the facility and that the cruel, unforgiving setting might contribute to the career’s excessive charges of PTSD, melancholy, and suicide and shortened life expectancy.
However even within the nations that impressed these reforms, sustaining them has confirmed tough. Understaffing in Norway’s prisons has led to individuals being locked of their cells for as much as 22 hours a day, and the suspension of programming whereas employees is reassigned to protect obligation. Danish prisons, in the meantime, are over capability thanks partly to new, longer sentences for some violent crimes, in line with researcher Kaigan Carrie, writing for The Dialog.
“The Nordic nations nonetheless present a supply of inspiration relating to their smaller jail populations and extra humane approaches to imprisonment,” Carrie concludes. “However as political beliefs on crime and punishment evolve, they’re clearly not immune from the issues” going through jail methods all over the world.
