October 16, 2017
In 2011, Attorney Donald Specter obtained a huge victory before the U.S. Supreme Court when, in Brown v. Plata, it ordered California to reduce its inmate population by more than 40,000.
Since then, Specter has been devoting his life to teaching American correctional officers and administrators about practices in western Europe, which are far, far different than those practiced here. As related in this ABA Journal article, for starters, the prisons in Denmark, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands are physically different—built to resemble life on the outside. Inmates have their own rooms and, in some cases, are allowed to cook in communal kitchens. But what strikes Specter most is that the prisoners are treated differently, too.
“They still regarded the people in prison as members of the community who were going to return to the community,” he says. “That has a whole bunch of implications.”
In 2013, Specter launched the U.S.-European Criminal Justice Innovation Program, sponsoring weeklong tours of European prisons for U.S. corrections officials, judges and lawmakers. He funds the trips using fees from his lawsuits, including some of the $2.2 million his office was awarded after the high court’s ruling in Brown.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (676 inmates per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). At least 95 percent of inmates in U.S. state prisons will return to their communities upon release, and more than two-thirds of those will be rearrested within three years. In Norway—where no life sentences exist and the incarceration rate is one-ninth that of the U.S.—the recidivism rate is about 25 percent after two years.
Participants in Specter’s program learn about the principles of normality—the idea that life on the inside should be as similar to life on the outside as possible—and dynamic security, which is based on interpersonal relationships between guards and inmates.
In Norway, correctional officers are trained to de-escalate potential conflicts. Each officer is assigned to oversee no more than four inmates and make conscious efforts to engage with those inmates on a human level, including participating in recreational activities.
Does this sort of thing work? It has in Norway. Before it began its own reform process about 30 years ago, Norway’s recidivism rates mirrored those of the United States.