Unfortunately, our office will be closed tomorrow, Thursday. BUT, to make up for this, you get your dose of Peace & Justice a day early! Here is the fourth and final piece of our four-part series on our incarceration nation. This weeks is an interesting one! Enjoy! The Norwegian Prison Where Inmates are Treated Like People Bastoy Prison Island, located a few miles off the coast of Olso fjord, 46 miles southeast of Norway’s capital, houses 115 prisoners, some of whom are murderers and rapists. These men live in conditions that critics have called “cushy” and “luxurious.” Yet, it has by far the lowest reoffending rate in Europe. There are 70 members of staff on the 1.6 sq. mile island during the day, 35 of whom are uniformed guards. Only four guards stay on at night. The guards count the prisoners five times a day, concluding at 11 p.m. when the prisoners are confined to their houses. Houses? That’s right. The small wooden bungalows house up to six people. Every man has his own room and shares the kitchen and other facilities. The men earn up to $9 a day, and they are given a food allowance each month of around $115 to buy provisions from the island’s supermarket to make their self-prepared breakfast and dinner (lunch is provided in the dining hall). In addition to the grocery store, the island also has a church, school, and library. The prisoner’s work day begins at 8:30 in the morning with jobs including tending farm animals or growing fruits and vegetables, as the prisoners grow a lot of their own food. Other jobs include the laundry, stable work, bicycle repair shop, ground maintenance, and the woodshop. Prisoners in Norway can apply for a transfer to Bastoy when they have up to five years of their sentence left to serve. Every type of offender may be accepted, so long as they fit the criteria, the main one being a determination to live a crime-free life on release. Prison Governor Arne Nilsen’s phrase for the prison is “an arena of deve loping responsibility.” “In closed prisons we keep them locked up for some years and then let them back out, not having had any real responsibility for working or cooking. In the law, being sent to prison is nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer. The punishment is that you lose your freedom. If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings,” Nilsen said. Bastoy’s reoffending rate speaks for itself: at just 16%, it is the lowest in Europe. Bastoy is no holiday camp. It’s a penal institution designed to heal rather than harm and to generate hope instead of despair. As Nilsen asserts, justice for society demands that people we release from prison should be less likely to cause further harm or distress to others, and better equipped to live as law-abiding citizens. -The Guardian, April 21, 2013. ~This is the final part of our series on our incarceration nation. Thanks for sticking with us through this enlightening series! Next week we start a new series on our drug culture.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 18:39:48 +0000
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