The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison | Hacker News Reader

The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison

nytimes.com

63 pointsdanso18 comments

> “You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners”. - Fyodor Dostoevsky

He wasn't wrong.

I'm in the UK and we seem to straddle the fence between a European "rehabilitation first" and US "punishment first" approach which is irritating as what we get is broken.

Study after study have shown that treating prisoners humanely while genuinely trying to rehabilitate them has the best outcome on recidivism and yet because politician's fear the media spinning the "soft on crime" line we end up with ever more draconian mandatory sentences, over crowded prisons and a system on the edge of systemic collapse.

We should be better than this.

It's interesting that in the UK we abolished capital punishment even though at the time there was actually pretty strong public support for keeping it - so politicians can do the "right" thing occasionally.

Indeed, UK support for capital punishment has only very recently gone under 50%:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32061822

Yet what we get, each time someone decides to be "tough on crime", is "tough on criminals", because that's easy and short-term, and to the tabloid reading masses is mistaken for "tough on crime".

The closest we ever got that closest religious fruitcake Blair saying "tough on the causes of crime" but he turned out to be like the rest[1].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-has-not-... and much more

> European "rehabilitation first"

Really? I have heard French justice/prison systems are nothing like a walk in the park. Probably the same across all southern Europe?

Agreed. It seems that we are going full circle from criminals are born to commit crime to criminals can be rehabilitated to criminals should be punished and soon criminals are born to commit crime (predictive/thought crimes). Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" was an excellent example of the French ideology of the period.

Yle - Finland's national broadcasting company - broadcast a TV-series named The Pohjoismaat (The Nordic Countries), where people from around the world are taken around in Nordic Countries and shown things they might consider weird. The first episode[1] was about a prison warden from the U.S. and the humane way how e.g. Finland and Norway treat their prisoners. The warden gets to visit Halden in Norway.

[1] http://areena.yle.fi/tv/2199727 (the audio is partly in Finnish and Swedish, but the parts where they take the warden around also contain English; the subtitles are only available in Finnish and Swedish)

We (Finland) also do have some ideas about "let's put old people in prisons and criminals in old people's institutions!"

This way the old people could get five healthy meals served to them daily, a possibility to shower every day, have some activity arranged to them regularly, and they would get paid instead of having to pay for their care.

Criminals would get only cold food, spend almost all their time alone, have their lights switched off at 8PM, and get to shower once a week, if the warden happens to be on a good mood.

That said, I don't object to prisons being the way they are. I object to the extremely lenient sentences for violent crimes. The only crimes where punishment is harsh seem to be tax and drug offences.

Just look at the recent case where a woman was held captive for four years, was forced to give birth to three babies while being held. The sentence for perpetrators? 3 years 10 months for the main responsible, of which he will do less than two years in prison. And he's appealing for too harsh sentence. This system is slightly too humane for my taste.

Well, it's important to remember the tabloids are always seeking to evoke feelings of outrage.

Anecdotes about too-lenient senteces always make it to the headlines, but errors in the other direction don't. Without credible studies we can't know which kind of errors cause more harm.

Prison population and budget is orders of magnitude smaller than elder care so the swap is just a values-related thought experiment about elder care. (Hopefully its inventor didn't mean to invoke "pampering criminals"). Of course it's an outrage that voters and politicians underbudget it so badly, but that's what you get with this austerity and anti-welfare mindset that's gripping Europe.

What surprises me the most about the headline is that humane treatment of prisoners is considered radical to the American public. I find this especially disconcerting given the large numbers of conservative Christians in the U.S. and their apparent desire for vengeance. It's almost as if Hebrews 13:3 and Mathew 25:35-46 are unknown to them. Someday the U.S. may see the light but I'm doubtful it will happen in my lifetime.

There are lots of people Christian in name only, not just in the US.

"Thanks for being christ-like and not christian" - Bill Maher

That's a bit of a No true Scotsman.

In a manner of speech, yes.

This all started when the person of Christ was co-opted to become the (conveniently deceased) figurehead to a bunch of institutions, his name on the one hand and his followers adopting his name but not really paying overly much attention to the principles (assuming history as recounted is accurate, likely it is not) is the root cause of that.

Imagine that your 'personal brand' of good intentions is stolen from you and re-purposed as a fig-leaf to cover anything from warrior popes to insane riches and abortion clinic attackers. In light of your comment of course 'no true Christian' would ever do anything like that.

I suspect Christ would not be pleased about a large chunk of those that lay claim to being Christian.

If you are having difficulty imagining that, just read _Small Gods_, by Terry Pratchett. Maybe also read it if you are not having difficulty.

The premise of that story, exploring the difference between followers and believers can be mapped directly to... well, quite a lot of religions, I'd think.

Yes and no. It's pretty clear from the Bible what good treatment of others is - there's a long historical record of people recognizing this and advocating for it. There's also a long historical record of people not doing so.

So the difference is that a True Christian would, e.g., explicitly focus on pursuing the Golden Rule[1], whereas a No True Christian would conveniently ignore or bend it at their convenience.

[1] "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Famously spoken by Jesus, quoting Hillel.

History gets to show that Christian beliefs gare entirely compatible with appalling behaviour, eg slavery, looting or plain old genocide. Nothing new under the sun.

Can anyone provide any cross-cultural comparisons of vengeance? It's probably fair to say that Scandinavian countries are less vengeful than USA, but how do countries in the rest of the Anglosphere, Slavic countries, Mediterranean countries, East Asian countries etc. compare? Is Christian background (which IMO places the most emphasis on mercy and forgiveness of all the world religious traditions) actually predictive of being less vengeful?

I'm more interested in how the public feels about punishment for the sake of inflicting suffering on the criminal/accused than actual government policies, though presumably the two would be closely related.

Some more pictures: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden-Priso... and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden-Priso...

If you find this interesting, take a look on this short Michael Moore video about another prison in Norway, Bastøy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01mTKDaKa6Q

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