Reforming Prisons

 Once more, the Norwegian prison system pops up. I think I saw this prison twice on TV while I was in prison. Where Norway incarcerates its murderers had less security, as in no razor wire, than did the low -security Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution. The latest appearance came this morning from The Guardian's Can California’s most notorious prison become a rehab center? Ex-residents weigh in:

While in prison, Tran co-founded and co-hosted a podcast called Uncuffed, and in one of his first segments recorded as a free person, he toured the facilities of Norway, known for having significantly better conditions and less restrictive policies than seen in the US prison system. He immediately noticed the bright colors, guards playing games with residents, lack of prison uniforms and the huge spaces for rehabilitative programs.

“It was mind-blowing to see officers connecting with incarcerated people and treating them like humans,” recalled Tran, who also spoke at the Prison Radio International Conference while in Norway.

Last week, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, announced he would be turning Tran’s former prison, the oldest in the state, into the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, focused on education, training and re-entry, and modeled in part after the Scandinavian system. It would be a major change for the 170-year-old San Francisco Bay Area prison complex, which houses 4,000 people, is home to the country’s largest death row and has a long history of human rights violations, including recent scandals involving systemic medical neglect, guard misconduct, overcrowding and solitary confinement and torture claims. It’s also known for its arts programs, college partnerships and newspaper.

 And some tidbits from the interviews of the former California prisoners:

Can you explain the concept behind Norway’s prisons?

Thanh Tran: You can sum up the Norway model with two words: returning neighbors. The expectation is this person will be coming home one day, so what type of neighbor do you want returning? My group visited the Bastoy prison island, Halden prison and Oslo prison, and what I found most impactful was the culture between correctional officers and incarcerated people. Officers need two years of training in social work, and they said they take these jobs to help people. They go in with a lens of social work and care: how do we help people rehabilitate? I saw officers barbecuing with incarcerated people, doing a marathon race with them, exercising with them, hanging out, playing cards, just having a conversation. That was so powerful.

 Our physical cells were different, being former Army barracks, but the lack of privacy remains, and I assume Indiana prisons are built to the same model as California's:

How does the Norwegian environment compare with the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR)?

Tran: It’s completely different. At the first CDCR prison I went to, most officers wouldn’t even call me by my last name, which I already found dehumanizing. They’d just call me “inmate”, “guy” or “You over there, come here!” San Quentin was a little better, but still the guards are trained not to connect with people: don’t tell incarcerated people your first name, keep a distance. They fear overfamiliarity. When you see an incarcerated person as a father, a brother, someone’s son, someone’s mother, it becomes harder for the officers to Mace them, lock them in the cell every night, hit them with a baton. California officers’ relationship with incarcerated people is a completely adversarial one, whereas Norway is about building relationships.

James King: Let me describe the San Quentin cell: it’s approximately 4ft by 8-9ft long, houses two bunks, a toilet and a sink. An average-sized person can stand in the middle and touch both walls. You share the space with another person, and it’s so small that one person has to get on their bunk in order for the other person to move through the cell. The cells don’t have doors, but bars. So you’re terribly confined with zero privacy. You hear every conversation in the building. It’s loud and chaotic, all day, every day. The design and culture is all about the efficiency of running the institution; institutional needs trump everything. Staff can and will compel people to work at the dining hall or wash dishes or clean tables if the institution needs it. Hundreds of people have to share roughly 15 phones. So people can wait in line for over an hour for 15-minute calls. And the process of doing in-person visits is extremely arduous. There is a scarcity of appointments. And then the visiting room rules say you can briefly hug upon arrival and when leaving, and you can get a disciplinary write-up if the hug is “too long” or a kiss is deemed “inappropriate”. This is all antithetical to creating a humane living environment.

Being Midwesterners, we pride ourselves on our commonsense; I hope anyone reading this will see the commonsense in this:

How would you like to see Newsom and California move forward?

King: I start with the premise that there’s no humane way to hold people in captivity. It is itself an exercise in violence. I think of a self-help program I did, where I had a wonderful facilitator who helped me connect with my emotions and grow and feel seen. But it was an hour long. And so the other 23 hours of the day would be about perpetuating my captivity or meeting the needs of the institution. There’s no way to fully recognize the humanity of a person who may be serving decades in prison. So if California is genuinely interested in healing and safety and changing the lives of people who have been impacted, it has to start with significantly reducing the amount of time that people spend in prison. And there has to be many more robust alternatives to incarceration. Because the violence of incarceration often does more to destabilize communities and create the conditions for so-called crime. My hope is Governor Newsom continues the work of closing prisons and giving people more opportunities to reintegrate into society.

Tran: If we move forward with prison closures, that’s billions of dollars we’re not spending on incarcerating people – that’s money we can use to invest in our youth so that they never have to go to prison in the first place. It’s pivotal that we reallocate those funds to our communities that desperately need them.

Maybe we can live up to the 1851 Constitution's promise that prison is to be reformative, not punitive.

sch 3/22