HOW NORWAY TURNS CRIMINALS INTO GOOD NEIGHBOURS
What is the point of sending someone to prison - retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending ates he s a Jane Kirby went to see the system in action, and to eet ison office s trained to serve as mentors and role models for prisoners.
“OK, and now put your big toes together and put your bum behind you!” calls the enthusiastic yoga instructor in English to the 20 or so a tici ants ho a e shuf in into chi s ose on u e
mats spread out on the grass in the faint early morning sunshine.
“Can you feel the stretch?” she gently asks a heavily tattooed man as she settles his ruf ed T-shirt and smoothes his wide back with her hand. “It’s OK, yeah?”
It could be a yoga class at any holistic health retreat anywhere in the world but the participants here at Norway’s maximum security Halden Prison are rather far removed from the usual yummy mummy spa clientele.
Barefoot murderers, rapists and drug smugglers practise downward-facing dog and the lotus position alongside their prison officers, each participant fully concentrating on the clear instructions from the teacher.
“It calms them,” says prison governor Are Hoidal approvingly, as we watch from the sidelines. “We don’t want anger and violence in this place. We want calm and peaceful inmates.”
Tranquillity does not come cheaply. A place at Halden Prison costs about £98, 000 per year. The average annual cost of a prison place in England in Wales is now about £40, 000, or £59, 000 in a Category A prison.
A uniformed prison officer on a silver micro-scooter greets us cheerily as he wheels past. Two prisoners jogging dutifully by his side, keep pace.
Hoidal laughs at my nonplussed face.
“It’s called dynamic security!” he grins. “Guards and prisoners are together in activities all the time. They eat together, play volleyball together, do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them.” When Are Hoidal first began his career in the Norwegian Correctional service in the early 1980s, the prison experience here was altogether different.
“It was completely hard,” he remembers. “It was a masculine, macho culture with a focus on guarding and security. And the recidivism rate was around 6070 percent, like in the US.”
But in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms “revenge” and much more on rehabilitation.
Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled.
“Not ‘guards’,” admonishes Hoidal gently, when I use the term. “We are prison officers’ and of course we make sure an inmate serves his sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are role models, coaches and mentors. And since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20 percent after two years and about 25 percent after five years. So this works!”
In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50 percent after just one year.
The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents’ sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature - in fact the prison, which cost £138m to build, has won several design awards for its minimalist chic.
Set in beautiful blueberry woods and peppered with majestic silver birch and pine trees, the two-storey accommodation blocks and wooden chalet-style buildings give the place an air of a trendy university campus rather than a jail.
A thick, curving 24ft-high concrete wall snakes around the circumference of the prison but there’s no barbed wire or electric fence in sight and you really have to look for the discreet security cameras. There are movement detector sensors on each side of the wall, Hoidal assures me - but no-one has ever tried to escape.
When I see the inside of a cell - every inmate has his own cell, which comes with an en suite toilet and shower room, a fridge, desk, at TV screen and forest views - and when I clock the immaculate sofas and well-equipped kitchenette in the communal common room, I ask Halden’s governor whether the level of comfort here isn’t a bit too cushy. Are Hoidal nods politely. He’s been expecting this question, of course. It’s one he answers every day, whether it comes from astounded foreign journalists or from critics within Norway itself.
“It is not easy to have your freedom taken away,” he insists.
“In Norway, the punishment is just to take away someone’s liberty. The other rights stay. Prisoners can vote, they can have access to school, to health care; they have the same rights as any Norwegian citizen. Because inmates are human beings. They have done wrong, they must be punished, but they are still human beings.”
In the on-site garage, two