The Abolitionist and The Prison Warden

Prison is supposed to protect, deter,  and rehabilitate. But what if isn't a very effective way of doing those things? My guests offer two different visions of how the prison system could be re-imagined - including a glimpse of a Norwegian prison that looks nicer than most college dorms. 

Featuring

Dr David Scott - abolitionism activist and scholar from the Open University

Are Hoidal - former warden of Halden Prison in Norway

Transcript

Cait Macleod:

Most crime stories end when the criminal is carted off to prison. Out of sight out of mind. But that life changing moment is where an important conversation needs to begin.

It's important to talk about prisons because the rights and wellbeing of incarcerated individuals are handed over to the state. And we all know the state gets things wrong now and then.

But even if you don't care about prisoners, remember that most of them get out. There are just 66 whole life prisoners in the UK. Even in the US which dishes out life sentences at a higher rate than any other country, more than six out of seven prisoners will one day be free. And part of our communities again.

We expect prisons to protect, punish, rehabilitate, and deter. And our taxes are meant to pay for that. But what if they aren't doing those things and what if there was a way to reach those goals without the  bars?

You're listening to Wood for the Trees. My podcast about the messy questions. The season is all about crime, policing and justice. And this is episode four: The Abolitionist and the Prison Warden. If you've listened to the podcast before then you know that I usually interview guests with opposing views to try to get closer to the truth.

But this time, my two guests are not necessarily diametrically opposed. Rather, they offer two different visions of how we could reimagine the prison system.

My first guest is an abolitionist who believes we should do away with prisons altogether. The second is the former warden of a very special prison in Norway.

 So let's get started.   

David Scott: I'm Dr. David Scott and I work at the Open University and I've been involved in abolitionism scholarship and activism for more than 25 years. And my first form of engagement with penal abolitionism came as a prison researcher and I was involved in an ethnographic study of prison chaplains in six prisons in the Northeast of England, back in 1996.

And through my experience as a prison researcher, seeing firsthand the harm and suffering of the prison place I became motivated to be a prison abolitionist.

Cait Macleod: And what is a prison abolitionist?  

David Scott:  Well, a prison abolitionist is basically somebody who questions the very moral and political foundations of prisons. So somebody who is highlighting that the justifications, the moral, political justifications of prison do not actually add up.

And indeed they argue with that because prisons and punishment are about the deliberate infliction of pain. And because we normally recognize that the deliberate infliction of pain and suffering is wrong, the burden of proof, the onus of justification, falls upon those who are actually advocating the prison and advocating punishment.

 And from my own personal perspective, having spent 25 years thinking about this notion,  I've been unable to find  a satisfactory justification for the deliberate infiction of pain and suffering. And hence by default, I am an abolitionist.

Cait Macleod: What do you mean when you say there's? No. Satisfactory justification for prison because I think most people think that prisons are quite important and necessary.

David Scott:  So we, first of all, need to recognize that prisons are profoundly dehumanizing and places of social death. We need to recognize that they lead to enormous amounts of self-harm. They lead to suicidal ideation and they lead to a very large number of self-inflicted deaths.

We need to recognize that the people who are in there have actually often had all sorts of great difficulties in their lives. They may have done something that's wrong, something which is very wrong, but ultimately we need to kind of look at their life course.

We need to recognize often these people have been failed on so many different levels by society.

I suppose because prisons are present in our society, we often kind of come to the conclusion that there must be some reason for why they're there in terms of a moral justification, that there must be something that they're doing which is actually good for us as a society and good for individuals within that society.

And when we actually look very close at that justification, whether it be around notions of rehabilitation, where there is very little evidence that prisons have been effective in a means of rehabilitation over the last 200 years, that they've been pretty much in existence as the kind of prisons that are here today.

When we look at the notions of prisons as places of deterrence. Well, we know that prisons have never been very effective as a deterrent because they're trying to deal with people who have got very little in society. So if you're homeless, if you have no money, if you've got no work, if you've got no family commitments, then being removed to a prison place, isn't necessarily likely to have the same deterrent for somebody who does have all those things.

And we know that from the recidivism rates, the, the rates of people being reincarcerated both in the United Kingdom, but also on a global level in terms of prison populations, the prisons, therefore not very effective in that sense of deterrence or indeed rehabilitation, but they're also not even very effective in terms of incapacitation.

Prison actually generates a capacitating effect for criminality. They can make people more likely To re-offend in the future. And what prisons can then largely do is simply hold people in an institution, out of society for a certain period of time. But then when they're released, they may we'll catch up with their criminal activity and them out to be propelled, to do more criminal activity in the future.

And we also know that retribution is not a particularly helpful where of trying to defend prisons and punishment because two wrongs simply don't make a right. And there is no logic to responding to one harm, which we considered to be problematic with another harm and another form of suffering. It simply doesn't add up in terms of  moral justifications.

 We have to get into a point where we're thinking does the prison, as it is currently constituted, as it is currently applied in society, should it continue to exist?

And that's the exact point that abolitionists are making.

Cait Macleod: I've never liked the idea of the justice system delivering retribution. To me, it seems medieval or biblical and in Old Testament sense and not at all appropriate for a democratic state. 

Recidivism rates are also a startling indicator that prisons are not very successful at preventing crime. In the UK around a third of offenders re-offend.In the US two out of three former prisoners are rearrested. And more than 50% will find themselves in prison again

And of course being in prison, doesn't make it any easier to get a good job or form strong community bonds. When you do come out again.  Which might make you more likely to commit another crime.  

David made another argument, which I don't find as convincing as his others, but it seemed very important to him and to his case. So I thought I'd better mention it. He argues that the kind of offenses that are dealt with by the criminal justice system are not the most serious harms in society. Corporations and governments, he says cause far greater harm and even can be implicated in more deaths.

He references amongst other things, the Grenfell Tower fire, which burned through an apartment block and killed 72 people. The landlord, construction contractors and local government are all being investigated for culpability. David also references government budget cuts as a source of severe harm.

For one thing, the justice system does account for harms perpetrated by corporations and government departments. There is the possibility of criminal manslaughter charges in the Grenfell case, for instance. Secondly, the fact that one group isn't punished enough doesn't tell us whether or not another group should be punished.

That being said, I do recognize that the justice system tends to target a certain type of individual. In the drug policy episode, we spoke about the fact that middle-class drug users can break the law without consequence in the privacy of their homes while people in poor communities have less space in their homes and are more likely to be searched and swept up by police.

And in the episode about Defund the Police, Alex Vitale spoke about the criminalization of homelessness with crimes like loitering. There are certainly prejudices and inequalities in the justice system. And I do think it's worth considering for a moment who we picture and how we feel about them when we say the word criminal

Okay. So let's say we agree that prison is not doing the things that it's supposed to do. If we find someone guilty of stealing something or hurting someone, it goes against our instincts to just say, “well, please don't do that again. Now, go on your way.” So what are the alternatives available to us, what can we do instead of locking people up?

David Scott: So when we actually talk about alternatives to prison, we need to, first of all, prioritize the needs of the victim. And we need to think about  how we can best support them, how we can do something to try and repair what's gone wrong for that person, because that is the most important thing. Of course, if that person's died, what can we do for families? What can we do in terms of responding to the needs of their community?

Now the prison does nothing for the victim. It isn't even focused on trying to kind of give anything back to the victim.

When we start thinking about the person who's done wrong, then we need to think about solutions which actually can stop that from happening again in the future.

But  punishment actually often closes down people’s ability to acknowledge and to admit that they've done something wrong. They often get to a point where they become defined themselves as the victim, and that makes them less likely to change and progress. And therefore, to lead a law-abiding and more productive form of life in the future. That's not always the case.

Some people will use prisons as a timeout and reflect upon what happened. But in the main, the evidence kind of points to the fact that prisons are profoundly counterproductive and actually make people more likely to offend.

So the first thing that we need to do, and this to me seems perfectly rational and sensible is to have solutions that work. Now that can be all sorts of different things. Crime itself, and harms are so diverse that there will never be just one solution. They will all need to be tailored to the actual incident and events and behaviors that have occurred.

And we need to have a myriad, a raft of alternatives that actually can be put forward. It can be things like therapeutic communities. It can be things like other forms of intentional communities where people are working with therapists or working with broader members of the community through mediation.

Cait Macleod: For those listeners, who've never heard of an intentional community. It's a notion you might associate with the sixties or an Israeli kibbutz. It's a group of people who choose to live together in a community. Sometimes these communities are in an isolated space. Members of the community tend to share a common purpose or philosophy and aim to foster a sense of teamwork.

They're often communal spaces. And individuals will voluntarily take on chores or responsibilities that benefit the whole group. In the context of criminal justice, I suppose it could be a bit like a court ordered timeout.  

David Scott:  We need to kind of recognize that sometimes people do need to be taken out of a social context. That may remove them from a given part of the country and place them somewhere else.  I've talked about kind of development of intentional communities in places like Scotland, which followed the 1970s Gruvberge Village example in Scandinavia, which basically provided an opportunity for people to have a timeout to reflect upon how they'd been behaving in in previous times, maybe even have their family come with them depending on the nature of the offense, Of course.

We need to think about it in terms of things like compensation. We can follow some aspects of the civil law. Sometimes what people need, particularly when you think about children, they need something to do. We've gotta remember that the criminal law is largely, as it's constituted, directed towards property harms by young people. You know, this is the kind of mainstay of the criminal process. It's about, kind of, locking up young people largely for doing, kind of, offenses which are somehow property-related.

Cait Macleod: Let me interrupt with a little fact check and some background information.

The most common type of crime in the UK is fraud and computer misuse. That includes some pretty nasty stuff, but nothing that would make for a good episode of CSI. This category of crime came to pole position during the pandemic.  

The second most common crime is damaging someone else's property. And the third is vehicle theft. So David is correct that a lot of the crime that happens in the UK is property related.  

As for the age of the average criminal. It seems that most crimes are committed by people aged 15 to 25. Criminal activity tends to start in the teenage years and peaks at about age 18.  

David Scott:  Often for children what they need is some kind of investment, some kind of finding a pathway to actually help them to, to build their lives, to have fulfilling lives.

Many of the people that are dealt with by the criminal law, as I mentioned earlier, have come from profoundly impoverished backgrounds. They’re unemployed. They're on substances. They've been sexually abused. They've been more harmed than actually done harm. So there needs to be, kind of, ways and means of, as I say, of trying to actually provide real genuine justice for all, which means victim-focused as our top priority. And then seeing what we can do to try  to help the person who's done wrong, to try and lead a law-abiding life in the future.

Cait Macleod: So some of the alternatives that you're talking about, take a lot of the punishment aspect of the justice system out of the picture. And maybe that's a more effective way of preventing re-offending, but what about accountability? If an individual is to blame for wrongdoing, do they not deserve some kind of consequence? Is that not a core aspect of justice?  

David Scott:  Abolitionism pretty much from its very foundations going back centuries in fact, places a massive question mark, all over the notion of criminal blame. And sometimes we just need to take a step back and recognize that you know, our society is not predicated upon meritocracies. It's not predicated upon people getting what they deserve.

So to assume that the criminal law can somehow come along and actually deliver justice as a form of dessert and that we can hold people culpable and responsible in a society, which is quite profoundly on equal, is ultimately I think kind of a fallacy.

So recognizing that, people do have choices, but those choices are constrained that we have to operate within the circumstances that we are in. So I think that we have a problem there with kind of the first sense of blameworthiness. And we need to get away from that.

Cait Macleod: Let me interrupt to play devil's advocate for a moment. Earlier David said that prison makes offenders feel like victims and that that's bad for rehabilitation. But I wonder if we don't strip someone of their autonomy when we don't hold them responsible for their actions. I agree that society is deeply unfair.

And that crime is driven by circumstance, but we have to acknowledge that even a constrained choice is a choice. Not everyone who's under extreme, emotional and financial distress will follow the same path. I'd even be willing to say that some offenders are downright nasty people who have acted with inexcusable malice.

Finally, I think a sophisticated criminal justice system can to some extent account for mitigating circumstances. If an abused woman kills her husband, that could impact the charges and the sentencing. Perhaps what David is saying could be an argument for a more nuanced and compassionate criminal justice system rather than abolition. Anyway let's let him finish his point.

David Scott:  Secondly, there's this notion of answerability and we often might think that punishment is a way of holding somebody to account, but is it, is it really doing that. For someone to be held to account, they need to kind of take responsibility for what they've done.

And if punishment is more likely to generate a sense of victimhood, then that means that actually accountability is actually less likely through punishment then through potentially alternative means. So the criminal law, the criminal process is not particularly good at actually generating accountability.

When we think about things like sexual violence and rape, the criminal law is not very good at actually dealing with those kinds of harms. It's estimated something like only 6% of people who involve a rape instance end up being dealt with by the criminal law.

So what about all the other 94% of women who've had to go through those terrible experiences. What about their needs? What about their safety? What about helping them in the first instance, you know, where, where's that coming into play with a criminal law?

But what the evidence from criminological surveys implies and testimonies of people who've experienced, you know, sexual violence and rape and child abuse, it’s, they want the, the person who's done it to them to tell them why. They want an answer. The criminal law does not give them an answer. The criminal law finds guilt or innocence.

So answerability is actually in some way kind of a more relational form of intervention, which requires a call and response. It requires an answer. And I think this is something which is not necessarily tied to punishment. Answerability can be done through a mediation. Answerability can be done through people having the opportunity to reflect upon what they've done and then to actually try and make amends and repair, if that is possible.

Of course, sometimes it's not possible. And of course, some people just simply don't want to have anything to do with the person who's harmed them.

Cait Macleod: This is a strong argument, in my opinion. We often think of prison as a way of delivering justice to the victim of the crime. But nothing about police reports, court dates and years of  bureaucracy sounds particularly healing. And that's assuming there's enough evidence for a crime to even get to that stage. If we're going to think about the victim then we have to admit that quite often the criminal justice system does not work.

I wanted to talk about the symbolism of sending someone to prison. I mean, I think of ancient mythology or early man living in tribes and the symbolic importance of punishing or exiling someone when they do something wrong. And it's a way for society to establish rules and boundaries about how to behave, to build a culture, to teach children right and wrong. So does prison have a role to play in sending a message to society.

David Scott: When we tried to send a message to society, we have to recognize that messages just don't get through, you know, and this is exactly the kind of thing where people are giving harsher sentencing sometimes, because they're trying to send a message to society as a form of deterrence with the assumption that people read it as such, but they don't necessarily do that.

What's a much more effective form of symbolic messaging is moral education. So we know that when we actually engage with the community, when we engage with people through rational discourse, when we try and actually have a form of democratic process engagement,  that is when messages get through, not through the criminal law. The criminal law is, is a profoundly ineffective way of sending a message to the community.

Cait Macleod: How can we know what doesn't, doesn't work as a deterrent? It must be something that's almost impossible to measure because you can't measure things that don't happen, crimes that don't get committed.

David Scott: Well, this is the Achilles heel of deterrence, Caitlin, is you can't measure it. You can't measure what doesn't happen. So there was never any evidence for deterrence. That doesn't necessarily mean deterrence doesn't exist.

You know, I might well be deterred from doing something because I might lose my job, you know, I might kind of face public shaming. I've got something to lose. You know, so I, I…deterrence might work for me. The vast majority of people who are dealt with by a criminal process have nothing to take away.

They don't necessarily have sometimes even homes.  They don't necessarily have a job to lose because they're unemployed. So you look at the social backgrounds of the people who we sent to prison, and we can, we can pretty much argue that these are the people least likely to be determined, but we can't tell that anywhere.

And of course, there's a moral question then of, of what we call general determines. Cause you've got two forms of deterrence. You've got individual deterrence and general deterrence. Individual deterrence is where you deter the individual. General deterrence is where you send that symbolic message to society. Now is it ever right to punish poor people, to send a message to middle-class and rich people? You know, no one could defend that, you know, but that's what we do.

Now, there is some evidence of the closing of prisons. We know at various different times that there's been radical reductions in prison populations. One example would be in England and Wales.

From the beginning of the 20th century right the way through to the 1920s, we saw an absolute, a massive decline in the prison populations. And there was no concurrent rise in crime rates. To assume that by prison populations going down, there'll be a rise in crime is, is actually kind of something where there's no historical evidence.

There's also people like Jerome Miller who closed all of the, kind of, the child prisons in the 1970s in Massachusetts. There was no rise in child crime.

So we have these different examples historically. And the truth is sociologists for more than a century have been saying to us, there is no relationship or no strong relationship between crime rates and prison rates. Now this is kind of something which is difficult for us to get our heads around because it's almost our common sense gut reaction that there must be a relationship.

The radical reduction in the prison population would not necessarily have any impact on the crime rates at all.

Cait Macleod: Okay. So let's imagine we all agree that prisons are a bad idea and we want to get rid of them. How would we practically go about doing that? There's obviously a big prison system. How would we go about making such a radical change to our society? Would we just unlock the cells and let everybody out. Or is it more complicated than that?  

David Scott: We're not going to get anywhere unless we actually have a groundswell of opinion. And that's the biggest challenge,  to educate and popularize some of the ideas that I've been talking through And that's the biggest obstacle. It's not the practicalities in truth.

But in terms of, kind of, practical steps, we know that we'd need to do it step-by-step. So you could, for example, end child imprisonment. You could end women's imprisonment. You could end large amounts of remand imprisonment.

You could look to, you know, a moratorium on prison building. We're currently in a process in England and Wales when our government is calling for 20,000 new prison places, a number of which will be in new-build prisons.

And then of course you look at sentences. So you start to persuade the judges to give lower sentences or no criminal punishment sentences at all.

There are around 75 to 80,000 people in prison in England and Wales at the moment, but there's over a hundred, hundred and 20,000 people who go through the prison doors every year. And most of those are on short sentences. You could say anything under six months, we should abolish prison sentences for that.

You could also then look at early release for certain people. You know, we've got a situation where we have things like people on, on IPP sentences, which have been subsequently abolished and, and these are indeterminate public protection sentences, which we recognize now that people are languishing in jail for decades. We could have a decree from the minister of justice to say, we release all people on IPP now because they’ve all overstayed their sentence.

Cait Macleod: To give you a little bit of background, sentences of indeterminate public protection or IPPs were introduced in 2005. Offenders were sentenced to a minimum term after which a parole board could choose whether or not to grant parole. They were abolished in 2012 after a review found they were being used extensively for low level crimes and led to inconsistency in sentencing. But the change wasn't retrospective so many offenders continue to serve IPPs and stay in prison for a long time despite the fact that these have been ruled unjust.

David Scott:  We could look at abolishing things like life sentences for children, particularly as a large number  of life sentences have been given to children for joint enterprise, which is where…the, the joint enterprise laws are actually used to control gangs.

And when one member of a gang perpetrates a serious harm, like a knife crime, they prosecute maybe five or six people in that gang. They don't worry about the person who's actually done it. They just simply send everybody to prison. And there are people spending 10, 15, 20 years in prison who are young people in their teens coming out in their late thirties, who basically have not done anything wrong.

 These little small steps…there's this death by a thousand cuts. We can start that today.  And within a couple of years we could have a much smaller prison system.

Cait Macleod: So how viable is prison abolition? I mean, do you think we could ever actually see enough support from the public for these ideas and actually political will to make it happen?  

David Scott: Well, it does need political will, and it does need agents of change in society to promote and push the agenda. The has been, kind of, some debates for example, about abolishing child imprisonments in the House of Lords and, and in parliament. You know, there's various different discussions going on about, kind of, transforming joint enterprise laws and groups like JENGbA, which is a pressure group run by families of those who have been convicted of joint enterprise laws. They're pushing  lots of MPS to try and see an end to that particular kind of law.

Similar thing with the IPP, indeterminate public protection, kind of groups. They’re also trying to push avenues for change. There’s pressure groups which are pushing for ending child imprisonment and ending women's imprisonment.

 We've seen  the BBC running various BBC ideas programs on prisons, including what a world with prisons would look like. We've seen abolitionists in America, like Ruth Gilmore being interviewed by the New York Times.

We're seeing a kind of mainstreaming of abolitionist ideas since the death of George Floyd a couple of years ago. We've seen a kind of big upturn in people taking abolitionist ideas seriously on all different levels of, of society. So there is hope.

Cait Macleod: If the goal is to shift popular opinion towards the abolitionist standpoint, what would be the first step in that process?

David Scott:  We can start by moving away from the demonization and kind of dehumanization of people who are processed by the criminal law and assuming that they are somehow different from the rest of the. And assuming that they are somehow different from from the kind of the law abiding community, because there isn't really a genuine law abiding community.

Most people will break the law in some way at some point in their life. And the vast majority of people who do that are not dealt with by the criminal law, because they often have a sense of kind of status and, and social setting, which can either hide or invisibilized the harm within their own homes or within their corporation.

Cait Macleod: I think prison abolitionism is fundamentally an idealistic idea. But do you think it is realistic?

David Scott:  I think to assume that abolitionism isn't realistic is to misunderstand abolitionism. It is undoubtedly a future-orientated approach. It is looking to build a better world. And abolitionism is profoundly aspirational.

But at the same time, there are very few absolutest abolitionists who simply call for the ending of all forms of punishment in the here and now immediately. Abolitionism has always been on a continuum between reform and the ending of prisons.  

It's one of the only kind of perspectives, which is actually recognizing the reality of prisons and recognizing that we can make incremental change in our society. So I think abolitionism is profoundly realistic.

Cait Macleod: I'm dubious that there is political well or public appetite for abolition. This month alone in the UK, the government announced tougher sentences for domestic abusers. And called for tougher sentences for criminals who don't show up at court. And the opposition party is unlikely to go easy on offenders with a former prosecutor at the helm.

In terms of public opinion, around two-thirds of Britons and a third of Americans think prisoners are not spending long enough behind bars. And around 40% of Britons support the death penalty.

But the biggest question that remained for me after this interview was whether the problems raised by David require us to chuck out prisons altogether or simply re-imagine them. So I decided to speak to someone who paints an entirely different picture of prison.

Are Høidal is now a senior advisor for the correction services in Norway. But when I spoke to him last year, he was still the governor of a remarkable prison called Halden which is nothing like any prison I've ever heard of. Here's what he had to say.  

Are Høidal:  My name is Are Høidal and I'm soon 63 years old. I've been working in the correctional service for nearly 40 years now.

I started in Oslo Prison in 1984. I studied the law in Oslo at that time and I worked in Oslo prison as an officer to earn some money for the study. So I finished the law study in 1987 and then I started my professional career in the correctional service. So I started with a job as a consultant in the Ministry of Justice in 1987, and I've been in the business since then. So I've been a governor in Oslo Prison for nearly 20 years. And then now the last 13 years I've been governor in Halden Prison.

Cait Macleod: What do you like about your job?

Are Høidal: Work with people. So I, I couldn't work in a factory or something like that. To talk with the inmates. I like that. I, I walk around in the prison and I like to talk to the inmates and I, uh, also have meeting with them and that motivate me every day that I can talk a lot with people. I love working with people.

Cait Macleod: Can you tell me about Halden?  

Are Høidal: Halden Prison opened in 2010.  At that time it was the most modern prison  in Norway.  They wanted to build a prison that was quite special.

We have a big wall around the prison. But when you come inside, I will say that the prison don't look like a prison. Everyone who visit Halden prison thinks this look more like a campus than a prison. And that was the architect's mission to make a prison that didn't look like a prison. It's, It's quite special when you come inside.

 It's based on what we call in Norway the normality principle. That means that the life inside the prison shall be like the life outside the prison.  You live in one place. You go to work another place and also school of course. And you stay there all day as we do in the normal life.

And then you go back to your home. That's your, that's your unit. And stay there and eat dinner together with the other inmates. And also have leisure activities in the afternoon. We try to make a quite normal life inside the prison like we have outside the prison.

We have what we call the import model. That means that we imported the people who work in the school, people who work in the healthcare, people who work in the drug addicts unit.

We don't, I don't hire them. We import them from the outside, from this local community. So, um, that we call the import model, and that's a very important principle in Norway that we import. And that's a part also of the normality.

So we have priests. Every inmate can vote. When we have elections in Norway, they can vote. So, uh, they have, uh, the same rights as all other citizens in Norway. An inmate don't lose any rights. We only take the freedom from them. And that's also a part of the normality principle.

Cait Macleod: And what, what are the rooms like? What are the common spaces like in the prison? Have you got bars or what does it look like?

Are Høidal: Oh, we don't have bars in the rooms, but we have a very thick glass, so it's not easy to break out, but the rooms look like what room you have in, when you study in a campus. It's 12 square meters. You have your own bathroom. You have a bed and also tv. You have fridge. When we close the door in the evening at 8:30, you have some food you can have in the evening in your own fridge, and then of course TV and, and bathroom. That's, that's the cell.

Cait Macleod: You can Google the facilities at Holden. It's pretty incredible. The rooms look like an Ikea showroom. You can see pictures of the inmates in plain clothing making food in the communal kitchen. They even have their own recording studio.  

And what kind of crimes have the prisoners done?

Are Høidal:  It's everything. We have murderers, we have drug smugglers. Many of the inmates who are in Halden, because we are nearby the Swedish border, are drugs smugglers.  And of course we have everything, every criminal activity. So, we are high security prison, so we take everything.

Cait Macleod: And what's the relationship like between the prisoners and the guards? 

Are Høidal: Yeah, that's a very important, principle in Norway all over the correctional service is that we have, uh, what we call dynamic security. That means that prison officers are a lot together with the inmates. They are together in the units. They are together  in workshops and when they go to school, the officers are also together with them. I will say all day. Also in the afternoon, they eat together, eat dinner together. They are together in leisure activities. So that's an important principle in Norway, that the officers are a lot together with the inmates and, and, it's important that, that we respect each other, treat the inmates like human beings. Very important.

Cait Macleod: So what about visits?

Are Høidal: They have visits every week from outsiders. We have also a house where they can have visit from their children, overnight visit.  That's very popular of course. We focus on what's best for those children. So, if that's good for the children, a father inside prison can have an overnight visit with his own children. So we have a lot of visits every week.

Cait Macleod: And for the day visitors. Is there glass between the prisoner and the visitor? What does that room look like?  

Are Høidal: Well, that's an ordinary room and we close the door. So, they can do what they want inside that room. But of course we take care of the security for the children. So in rooms where children are visit, we have glass in the door. We can check that everything is okay. But, they have private visits with their girlfriends. That's a normal thing.  

Cait Macleod: Yeah, it's probably healthy .

Are Høidal: Yeah, I think so.  

Cait Macleod: So before you were the governor at Halden, you were governor of Oslo Prison. Is Oslo Prison similar to Holden, or are they quite different?  

Are Høidal: You cannot compare Oslo and Halden. It's a very big difference between those two prisons. in Oslo it's a very old prison. The old part is closed down now in Oslo and that was built in 1850. So it was 170 years when they closed it down. And the other part, the new part, is from early 1900. So it's also quite old prison.

So, it's not very good facilities there.  Very little activity. The inmates are a lot in their cell during the day. We have a less, very small activities and workshops and school in Oslo prison. So, they plan to also close down the newest part of Oslo Prison. So, they will build a new Oslo Prison in some years from now.

But we have built some new prisons in Norway the last years. They are quite modern. The new prisons after Halden.

The standard of the prisons in Norway are very, very good. And, it started, I will say in early nineties when they built a prison in a town called Bergen, early nineties. That was very good prison at that time. And after that the prisons in Norway are quite modern.  But Halden is a little more special than others because it don't look like a prison.

The other new prisons are more...more look like a prison, I will say.  But, they didn't build like Halden Prison in the new prisons because we have to say that Halden Prison is quite expensive. So, therefore they didn't build new Halden prisons in Norway.  So we are unique.

Cait Macleod: Do you see prisoners change while they're at Halden?

Are Høidal: Yeah. Of course in Norway, we have a progression system that they start in a high security prison and after some time you go over to low security prison, and we have a lot of them in Norway.

So I send many inmates from high security in Halden over to open prisons, low security prisons, and they end up often in, in halfway houses, and I see a lot of inmates that change. Of course, we have a recidivism rate in Norway that's 25% I think that come back to prison. So 75% of people in Norway who had done something wrong don't come back to the system. So, I think this worked very well.

Cait Macleod:  Some people think that prisons like Halden are very luxurious and comfortable, and that prisoners should suffer and have a bad time in prison because they've done wrong. Do you think that's true?

Are Høidal: I get that question very often. And, of course when you build a new prison, you cannot build that prison bad. It's a new materials, you use materials that last for many years. So you have to build modern, when you build something new. I don't, I will not say that this is luxurious prison.

It's a normal size of the rooms. They have an ordinary bed. Of course they can go to the toilet, but that's also normal. So…and look at TV is quite normal. So, what's so special with Halden Prison? It's normal things. To have a fridge is normal. To have a TV is normal. To have a bathroom is normal. So we have built a prison that's quite normal.

You cannot treat a person bad because he will be released one day. We release every inmate in Norway to the society, and we often say, "what neighbor do you want? What neighbor do you want? We release your neighbor. Do you want a neighbor who are angry? Angry at the society because we treat them bad? Or do you want a neighbor who are rehabilitated and had good, education in inside the prison? I think it's best that we release good neighbors. Not bad neighbors. That's, that's our mission.

Cait Macleod: Yes. Well, why do you think that Norway has a low recidivism rate? What's the cause?

Are Høidal: Now, I'm not sure. I have visit a lot of prisons all over the world. In US, in Russia, in Romania, in China, in England. So I've seen it with my own eyes that many prisons all over the world is very, very, very bad prisons, bad conditions. There are very few officers, many inmates on one officer. In Norway we have one-to-one, one inmate, one officer.

I think that's maybe the most important thing for Norway that we have so good results because we are following up inmates in a special way. We treat them like human beings.  And we respect them even if they have done some really bad things.

That's the Norwegian model. But, I know that also in England, in Sweden, Denmark, many, many countries all over the world also treat the inmates good, but maybe we have more resources in Norway to do it in a better way than many other countries. We have more officers, even if we have budget problems in Norway, we have still lot of officers and people who work with rehabilitation.

We have a very good school inside Halden Prison. We have very good workshops with workshop officers. We have social workers, we have program officers. So, we have a lot of resources compared to many other countries all over the world. So I think that's maybe the answer for your question, why we have better results in Norway.

Cait Macleod: Do you think it's still possible to rehabilitate prisoners if you don't have a lot of resources?  

Are Høidal: Yeah, I think it's a way you treat people. Even if we didn't have so much resources as we have in Norway, it's still important that you can also work with change, to change people, and you can change people by motivate them, by treat them well.

So I think you can do that also in a prison in US or England or all over the world. You can treat people and try to motivate them to stop being criminals. So I think you can do that in every prison, all over the world If you, if you have the right values.

Cait Macleod: What's the biggest challenge in your job?

Are Høidal:  The budget. Of course, the budget problem all over, all over the country. Not only the prison system. But we don't get so much money from the oil that we get before and we have a lot of more, more older people  in the country. So, I think the budget all over the society is quite tough.

So we struggle with the budget every year. That I will say is my biggest problem because it's the salary for the officers who cost money in Norway. So when we have less money, we cannot have so many officers as we have before. And I will say that that's a pity and, that's my biggest problem.

Cait Macleod: How much did they get paid? Can I ask? Do you know? 

Are Høidal: 500,000 Norwegian Crowns. I'm not sure what that's in town, but, but 50,000 Pounds, something like that.

Cait Macleod: That's quite good.

Are Høidal: Yeah, I will say that.

Cait Macleod: If you could change anything about the Norwegian prison system, what would you change?

Are Høidal: I think we have still too many old prisons in Norway where they have too much isolation. Like Oslo prison, that's a prison where there are very little activity. I think the inmates are in their cells 22 hours a day. So, it's very, very bad. I would close down those old prisons and of course, build some new modern prisons and. So I will give money to the correctional service and then close down these old prisons and open new prisons.

Cait Macleod: Halden Prison is proof that those who we think of as the worst in society are capable of change. And it's proof that treating people well and investing in them is an effective way to make that happen.

But Norway has resources that are not available in other places. For one thing, how do you justify providing good education, housing and social services to inmates if you live in a country where those things are not available to law-abiding citizens?

Plus the prisoners at Halden face the possibility of a quote unquote normal prison if they don't follow the rules. So perhaps the model relies on the existence of a more unpleasant prison.  

And it's worth remembering that one in four prisoners who spend time at Holden still go on to commit another crime.  

As for David's solutions, I do think he might be comparing an idealized imagined alternative to the real occurrence system. But any system we dream up will be marred by political motives, budget cuts, incompetence, all the things that impact every big state operation.

The question with big unwieldy systems, whether it's the police, the NHS, or even FIFA, is whether its problems are best fixed by reform or starting from scratch.

I suspect the most realistic approach is a patchwork of reforms and alternatives. That are politically viable and appropriate to the context. In coming episodes, I'll talk to a US federal prosecutor turned clemency advocate. And a South African researcher tackling torture in African prisons to try to learn more about what those reforms and alternatives should  be.

You've been listening to Wood for the Trees with me, Cait Macleod

A huge thank you to my guests, Dr. David Scott and Are Høidal.

If you enjoyed this episode, why not hit subscribe? I’d really appreciate it. And it will help me to keep making the show. And if you know someone who might enjoy the podcast, please tell them about it. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email cait@cantseethewood.com. That's ‘wood’ with no ‘S’ at the end. Thanks for listening.