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Prison Limits
by Michela Bowman
Stranger’s Guide: Scandinavia

There’s a small house on Bastøy Island in Norway that the island’s residents call ‘Amerika.’ Where it sits today, nestled at the edge of evergreen forest, fronting a dirt road and looking out onto a pastoral landscape, was, in the first half of the last century, an outhouse. Bastøy Island was then home to a reformatory school with a reputation for brutal treatment of the boys it confined. This was in the early days of Norway’s independence from Sweden, and before the discovery of oil made Norway the wealthy nation it is today. The story goes that the residents of the island named their outhouse ‘Amerika’ because, while sitting in it, they would dream of emigrating across the Atlantic to a more promising future. The house nicknamed Amerika today is a small, red-roofed, neatly kept two bedroom with a well-stocked kitchen and modest but comfortable furniture throughout. Bicycles lean near the back door, and a picnic table and grill sit beside it. At any given time, it is home to two men. Those men are prisoners, and on the day I visited, neither of them had any interest in ever leaving Norway.

The prison governor, Tom Eberhardt, and a guard who escorted me around the island on a crisp autumn day in 2017, clearly enjoyed telling the story of the outhouse named ‘Amerika’ to the group of Americans I’d come with. When we reached the house itself, our guide knocked and held the door for several of us, inviting us in. There was a mat by the door where we left our shoes, noting the pristine floors in the hall. Bastøy is a place where rain, snow and ice keep regular company with daily farm labor, and maintaining clean floors indoors requires the ingrained habits of care.

I was there with a group of graduate students from the Yale School of Architecture and their teachers. I had come as a member of a non-profit based in Oakland, CA called Impact Justice that is dedicated to creating a more humane, responsive and restorative system of justice in the US. Together, we were exploring whether architects and designers have a role to play in envisioning a different kind of future for the US’s response to crime.

The guard remained outside while we crowded into a living room that looked a bit like a sparse IKEA showroom. Two men lounged on the couch playing video games on a large, flatscreen TV. They were dressed in casual street clothes, as are all of the prisoners on Bastøy, and they graciously interrupted their game to welcome us into their house. They’d eventually confess that they were accustomed to the arrival of visitors who come to ask them about their life on the island and that it gave them a chance to practice their English. First, though, they asked where we were from and, upon hearing, promptly extended condolences over the election of President Trump and wished us a brighter future. While it felt like a setup—the irony of it while we stood there receiving condolences from men incarcerated on the footprint of the former outhouse—it was impossible not to also feel that it was right we should be questioning our own dreams and our own future amid the quiet but persevering optimism of a place like Bastøy.

It was an experience mirrored the next day inside Halden Prison, one of Norway’s “closed” prisons. Norway classifies its prisons not as minimum, medium and maximum security, but rather open or closed. Closed prisons have prison walls and security to keep prisoners inside them except during furloughs, and they control prisoners’ daily activities and movements to a much higher degree than open prisons. Most prisoners in Norway begin their sentences in a closed prison, and all prisoners spend time in an open prison prior to release. Halden is known for its excellent education and job training programs, all of which are run by the same schools available to those in the free world. The degrees and qualifications the prisoners receive on the inside are identical to and indistinguishable from those they’d earn on the outside, and employers not only have no need to know where they were gained, but are prohibited by law from accessing most criminal record information, with few exceptions. In addition to traditional academic scholarship, prisoners at Halden can study high-end culinary arts, music, design and printing, among other skills. In the print shop,outfitted with computers running the most up-to-date design programs and walls covered with the prisoners’ art, the four men there, busy at work when we arrived, broke into chants of, “Trump, Trump, Trump,” when they learned where we were from, only to dissolve into laughter. It was light-hearted teasing, and one of the men said, cracking a smile, “No, sorry, we love America. Good luck with that.”

What was so striking about both encounters, and the majority of the conversations we had walking through Norway’s prisons, is that nearly everyone had something they wanted to talk about more than they wanted to talk about their incarceration, and not a few of them felt sorry for what they saw happening in the US. They would and they did answer questions about their lives inside, even relayed bad experiences, but to speak to them was to pull them away from something that engaged them at least as much. In Bastøy, that was farm work, bicycling, jogging or video games. At Halden, it was classes, cooking, soccer, nature walks or just time alone in their comfortable rooms. I’ve been visiting people incarcerated in prisons and jails all over the US for the last 30 years, and those conversations, while running the gamut, are always dominated by what they are enduring inside.

Norway has become famous for its prisons, which visitors love to call “radically humane.” Sensational news stories with images of Bastøy’s prisoners sunbathing on their porches, or video tours through Halden where visitors gape in awe at the relative comfort and freedom of life inside its walls, have circulated widely over the last decade. Nordic countries’ progressive prison systems, and Norway’s in particular, are destinations for reform seekers from around the world. And I’ve visited twice now in a similar capacity. I’ve spent much of my adult life as an advocate for prisoners’ rights and working against cruel, inhumane and unsafe conditions in America’s prisons. I’ve also always believed the world will be a better place without prisons. I wanted to know if Norway’s humane prisons would change my mind.

Norway does indeed have lessons to teach those who flock there to observe its prison system. But prisons tell so much about a society and, ultimately, Norway’s prisons are no different: they offer, first and foremost, a lesson about Norway.

It’s no surprise that what one finds in these institutions is that they are, in both small and fantastically large ways, more humane than almost any carceral facility in the US. But the points of divergence between the criminal justice system in Norway and ours didn’t start at the prison walls (and indeed, prisons like Bastøy don’t actually have walls). Rather, they start at the foundations—at the principles that gird the relationship between a state and its citizens.

State-sponsored punishment is always an exercise of power, generally one levied against society’s most marginalized and vulnerable. In Norway, it’s an exercise in the paternalistic power—both the protection it offers and the communalist, integrationist values it prioritizes—of the welfare state. I say this knowing that there’s widely held disdain for the paternalistic protection and ideals of welfare states outside of those countries that run the best of them. Neither Norway nor its prisons are socialist utopias, but it’s difficult not to envy the ethic of care that runs through the relationship between the state and even its most demeaned citizens and residents.

Yet punishment by the state is always an expression of power, and even in the most humane penal systems the world over, including in Norway, it is still the case that most of the people locked up are those most vulnerable in that society. Vulnerabilities may not look the same everywhere, falling along economic, cultural and racial lines to varying degrees, but the power to definetransgressive behavior and then to punish it almost always rests exclusively with the privileged and empowered of any society. And punishment is designed to protect privileged interests. So, to examine Norway’s penal system is to learn something about the country’s conception of the state’s role in wielding that power and about the relationship of the state to its people and the values the state feels responsible to uphold.

Most visitors look at Norway and view its small and homogenous population. But Norway is a country undergoing change. It has long absorbed immigrants from Sweden and Eastern Europe, but more recently it has seen an influx of immigration from Syria, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. Just as the resilience of Norway’s welfare state is evident in its approach to incarceration, so too are the welfare state’s fissures evident in the emergence of right-leaning economic policies and anti-immigrant sentiment. While Norway still looks like an overwhelmingly homogenous white country with small communities of color to an American walking the streets of Oslo, there are many more people of color in its prisons. Norway’s immigrant population makes up 16.8% of the country’s residents, but nearly 30% of its prison population are classified as “foreigners,” which can include children of immigrants: even if born in Norway, they are officially counted as foreigners.

There is also the troubling history of the indigenous Saami people who have been marginalized and locked in a centuries-long battle to maintain their cultural heritage and political and civil rights throughout Lapland, across borders from Norway, Sweden and Finland to Russia. Indeed, many of the racist stereotypes that Europeans have heaped on indigenous populations around the world have led, at times in their history, to over-criminalization and punishment of the Saami in Norway. That is one of the few points of modern comparison between Norway’s history and the dynamics of racialized oppression that characterize the US and is reflected in the way we imprison. Neither the character nor the scale of it can be compared.

Norway is also not without poverty, most of it borne by its immigrant population, and while the state provides a significant safety net, unemployment can mean struggle and marginalization. How the country handles the pressures of immigration that will likely increase in coming decades, if for no other reason than the fact that climate change will ensure it, will be a test of the character of kindness on which the country prides itself.

What’s obvious from spending time inside the country’s prisons is what Norway values today and the extent of its investment in those values. They are the values of a welfare state in a democratic and largely capitalist context. Norway is called a socialist democracy, but it prepares its citizens to participate in a competitive, capitalist economy. It provides housing assistance to every citizen who needs it and to many immigrants as well, in addition to free health care and education through graduate school to all by redistributing wealth using a progressive tax system that prioritizes the welfare of those with greatest need over the ability to accumulate vast wealth. These things about Norway, the resilience of its welfare state—its socialist principles, and indeed its paternalistic view of the state’s role—are evident in every brick laid, service provided and policy decision made throughout its penal system.

To treat its people poorly—any of its people, including its prisoners—is a reflection on the country’s character. Pragmatically, society functions better when its people are whole citizens, so its prisons should be about helping people become whole citizens, or becoming “good neighbors,” as everyone who works for the Norwegian prison system likes to say. And the way to help people in prison become whole citizens is to prepare them for their release from the day they enter the system, to keep them inside for as short a time as society will abide, to maintain their family and community ties while inside and to ease them out with guidance every step of the way.

In practice, this means that virtually every prisoner has their own room and bathroom with a door that shuts. They also have the key to their own room so that they can lock others out during their free time if they choose. At Halden, I didn’t see a single housing unit with more than 12 people in it, each with his own room. When asked, prison leadership and guards alike said they believe it’s difficult to live in harmony with more than 10 people at a time, 12 at the most. And so their housing units are designed to optimize a harmonious community with privacy for all and shared space for no more than those in a given unit.

Each house on Bastøy has a kitchen where the prisoners cook their own food. In every kitchen, we saw knives along with all the other essential cooking utensils. In the US, we have an industry that makes rubber pencils and special toothbrushes because we don’t want incarcerated people to have anything that might be turned into a weapon.

Norway’s prisons create lives with patterns as close to normal as possible in an institutional setting, with work and school hours for everyone, low but not insignificant pay for work or school and four or five hours of free time every day for exercise, recreation, socialization and, on Bastøy Island, sauna time. Prisoners are free to choose work or school, or neither, but will not be paid a wage if they choose to opt out of both. Prisoners also have significant access to television, films and reading material. In Halden, every prisoner has his own TV with unlimited cable, a DVD player and free time for entertainment. The library at Halden is impressive, and its librarian can get books on demand. I asked prisoners throughout my visits and never found a single instance of a prisoner being denied reading material, or any media, based on content.

In the US, we have somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 people locked in some form of solitary confinement on any given day, too many who remain isolated for years. In fact, some remain isolated for years longer than the average sentence for murder in Nordic countries. There, virtually no one is held in solitary, and when it’s used, it’s used for hours, or at most for days. In Norway, all prisoners are eligible for and receive furloughs regardless of their crimes, because they will all get out one day and, as a society, they’ve decided that no one is served by so completely institutionalizing and isolating prisoners that they can’t adjust to freedom when their sentence ends. Furthermore, almost no one is released directly from a closed prison in Norway. Thirty to forty percent of the country’s prisons are open prisons, like Bastøy, which means the prisoners leave for some portion of most days, live in unlocked houses, and are held there merely by their own agreement to abide by their sentence. Many work in the community during the day and travel without escort in and out of the prison grounds. The prisoners of Bastøy run the ferry to and from the island. They buy and prepare their own food and are given supportive counseling, education, job training and assistance finding housing before they’re released.

In the US, we cut our prisoners off from the natural world with very little exception, and often even from fresh air and natural light. They provide regular, daily access to air and light with almost no exception, and in many cases to the natural world in ways that the average city dweller would find breathtaking. Prisoners on Bastøy work the land, ride horse-drawn carriages and, in their free time, can swim off the shores of the island. Governor Eberhardt of Bastøy and Deputy Governor Strømnes of Halden, who shepherded us around their respective prisons, were both insistent that time spent alone in nature was essential to the work they do in preparing people to be “better neighbors.” Both extolled the virtues of “taking walks in the woods” as a form of restoration. To an American’s ear, the adamant faith in the healing power of the natural world sounded almost proselytizing, similar to the reliance our US prisons often place on religion as the key to personal change. Religion is not absent from Norwegian prisons, but the presence of the Lutheran church and quiet representation of other faiths don’t seem to play the foreground role that religion does in US prisons.

Bastøy Prison, in particular, has a reputation for leniency around the world. I wouldn’t call it leniency. The men there are prisoners who have had their freedom taken from them by the state as punishment, the same as any other prisoner. It is, in fact, why they continue to use the word “prisoner” to describe themselves. In the US, there’s a movement toward people-first language to mitigate the dehumanizing nature of incarceration here. There, the issue is described differently. Outsiders look at the lives of prisoners in Norway and can easily forget that they have lost their freedom, and in doing so, underestimate how difficult the punishment is to bear. And so, even in the relative freedom of Bastøy, the men there want you to remember they are prisoners. While no one is physically preventing them from leaving, the consequences of doing so are worse than sticking it out. We call it leniency because many of the men on Bastøy have committed crimes for which we punish people with an entire lifetime—decades up to and until death—in prison. They are there for significant property crimes, organized crime and violent crimes including rape and murder. We call it leniency because these men are not tortured, have not been stripped of their humanity or dignity and have not been stripped of their ability to connect with the outside world. The Norwegians see life on Bastøy as an investment in a better future for people who might be their neighbors one day.

In addition to having the freedom to roam the idyllic island, and time outside of school if they choose it instead of work, or serious work—farm work, primarily, but for significantly fewer hours than most Americans are accustomed to because their workday ends at 3:30 p.m.— they’ve created rhythms and patterns of life that allow a person to be as close to whole as may be possible without liberty. Prisoners on Bastøy have formed music groups and traveled off the island to perform. They run a store from which they buy their food with the money they earn from work, and at the end of each year, the prisoners’ council votes to decide what to do with the surplus they’ve earned from the store. When I was there in 2017, they’d voted to purchase mobile phones and free mobile service for every prisoner on the island so they could make unlimited calls to their families. They ride bikes and jog. They take walks in the woods. There are foxes on the island so tamed by the food prisoners feed them that they leave the chickens alone. And the men are permitted weekends off the island to be with their families on furlough, returning after each visit to their sentence on Bastøy.

In showing us the family visiting house on the grounds of Halden prison in Norway, a house where a prisoner’s entire family can come and spend the weekend, the officer giving the tour told us he was recently invited to dinner by one of the prisoners during his family visit. He described sitting at a meal with the man’s wife and children and spending the evening watching television and playing games with them. He told me he expected they’d stay in touch when the man is released.

Furloughs and family visitation are not the only ways that prisoners in Norway are encouraged to remain integrated in society or are prepared to reenter. They also retain most of the rights of citizenship, far more than in the US. For instance, prisoners retain the right to vote throughout their incarceration. “Of course!” we were told, when asked if prisoners could vote on the inside. This was generally followed up with the obvious, that voting is fundamental to citizenship, and prisoners in Norway who started out as citizens remain so. Not only are prisoners allowed to vote, they do. At each election, the candidates campaign in the prisons, and ballot boxes are brought to the prisons to ensure full participation.

“How can prisoners, who have more at stake in our prison system than anyone, have a say in the way we run prisons if they can’t vote?” I was asked by a prison officer in Norway.

“Good question,” was my only response.

Before my first visit, a number of people at home told me that humane prisons were all well and good, but they were troubled that Norway didn’t have a system that could adequately punish Anders Behring Breivik, the man who killed eight people and injured 209 with a car bomb, then hours later shot and killed 69 people at a camp, mostly children, injuring another 110. Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison, which is a life sentence in Norway, and few people who receive a life sentence serve the full 21 years. However, in Breivik’s case, the government has the power to hold him in five-year increments beyond the 21 years, possibly until his death. In Norway, I asked a number of prison staff about Breivik. They varied in their expectation about whether he will ever be released. Sitting in the quiet of the Lutheran church on Bastøy Island, wooden arches overhead in the airy space, I spoke to Governor Eberhardt. Breivik is in general population in a prison farther north, and he assured me the conditions were not significantly different from those at Halden, and that the prison system hadn’t needed to make changes to accommodate him on the inside. Eberhardt said he suspected Breivik would never get out. The Deputy Governor at Halden had a different response. Both of these men spoke dispassionately of their belief in their country’s values, their investment in every person’s humanity. While they speak with reserve, there is passion in the ideas, and I could hear it in Deputy Governor Strømnes’s response. Breivik might get out, he told me. If he’s no longer a threat to society, he’ll be released. But most importantly, to both men, is the fact that Breivik is not only housed in general population, but carrying on with a daily routine much like those we saw in the prisons we visited. His liberties are curtailed, but not even as much as some of the children I visit in locked cells in juvenile facilities in the US. What struck me is that both Governor Eberhardt and Deputy Governor Strømnes saw Breivik as evidence of their success. Breivik put their values to the test. They recognize that many people in Norway, and even more around the world, thought Norway would have to change because of Breivik. It was assumed no one who committed such crimes could be housed in one of Norway’s “radically humane” prisons. And yet, there he is, proof that their values can stand the test of the worst crime imaginable.

The conditions I describe are the carceral manifestation of a system that punishes with extreme restraint, that is dedicated to the fundamental humanity of every person who is incarcerated; a system dedicated not only to their humanity, but their rights as citizens for those who are citizens and opportunities for those who are not. This is key. Norway’s incarceration rate is among the lowest in the world, not because its recidivism rate is so low, but because the institutions themselves represent an entirely different conception of what prison is meant to accomplish.

The prisons they run cannot be scaled up and retain their character. The people running these institutions know that and voiced it to me repeatedly. The politicians and voting public seem to understand that, as I was told when I asked about public resistance to Nordic leniency. They say unequivocally that they can only run prisons like theirs if they commit to incarceration rates below even the average for Western Europe. In other words, it isn’t simply that a small prison population allows them to run a humane prison, but humane prisons require them to keep their prison population very small. The country’s largest prison has a capacity of 400 cells, while the smallest has just 13, and they’ve created safety valves to keep people out whenever there are upward pressures on their incarcerated population.

There’s a great deal I haven’t seen in Norway that would be necessary to round out the picture. I’ve never visited the women’s prison, never seen how prisoners with severe mental illness are treated, since they are screened upon arrival and referred for services. And I’ve never seen what an institution for juveniles who are removed from their homes looks like.

During my first trip to Halden Prison, I spent time with a small group of visitors in a housing unit with a young man serving a lengthy sentence of years by Norway’s standards. Every housing unit in Halden has between 10 and 12 single bedrooms, each with their own bathrooms, a comfortable common living space with a TV and video game console, a gleaming kitchen and a dining area, all reminiscent, again, of an IKEA showroom. And in each such unit, one prisoner volunteers for the job of managing the domestic side of their lives. They’re paid for it as they would be paid for any other job, and while the other men in the unit go to work or classes between 9AM and 3PM, they clean the common spaces and cook the day’s meals with food delivered each morning. The day I was there, fresh salmon and greens had been delivered for what seemed to be shaping up to be a tasty dinner. Laundry hung on racks to dry, and the common areas and bedrooms were all nearly immaculate. It was a clear day, and light shone through the many windows surrounding the unit. The young man was amiable and, no matter how hard any of us pressed, would not say a single negative word about his life inside Halden. I asked him what he would do if a staff person treated him disrespectfully, or worse, abusively. There were no staff around but he seemed perplexed by the question. The staff are wonderful, he said. They’re our supports. They keep us safe. But what if ? I asked. Well, I guess I’d call the police, he said, but no one here has ever made me feel unsafe. Any complaints at all? The one he finally dredged up while showing us his room was that he’d enjoyed horror movies before prison and now, because he was alone in a single room at night, he got scared and had taken to watching rom-coms on the flatscreen TV neatly attached to his wall. His bedroom window looked out on a tranquil forest of birch trees, and he’d had to find ways to accustom himself to the solitude.

So, isn’t Norway better off for having created a more humane system of incarceration? One would be hard pressed to say no based on what we saw.

Someone from our group finally asked the young man, “if you could change one thing about Halden Prison, what would it be?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said, smiling. “I’d let everyone out and burn it to the ground.”

Prison is still prison.

MICHELA BOWMAN has been working with people who are incarcerated and advocating for their rights for the last 30 years. She’s a Vice President at Oakland-based Impact Justice and currently co-directs the National Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Resource Center.