United States | News & Politics

Here's what prisoners have to say:

Here, it is worth looking at the results without any comparative benchmark. Notably, around or above half of prisoners in Norway agreed with items including ‘I feel cut off from the outside world in here’ (56%) and ‘All the Prison Service cares about in this prison is my “risk factors” rather than the person I really am’ (50%); between a third and over two-fifths agreed that ‘This system treats me more like a number than a person’ (41%), ‘The level of security and control in this prison is oppressive’ (39%),‘Staff in this prison think that prisoners are morally beneath them’ (38%), and ‘I have no control over my day-to-day life in here’ (35%). Around one in five agreed with the items ‘The prison system is trying to turn me into someone I am not’ (23%) and ‘This prison is trying to mess with my head’ (22%) and or disagreed that ‘Staff in this prison do their best to help me’ (23%), ‘Staff here treat prisoners fairly’ (20%), and ‘I feel safe from being injured, bullied or threatened by other prisoners in here’ (19%); and substantial proportions disagreed with the item ‘I feel cared about most of the time in this prison’ (16%), or agreed that ‘I am not being treated as a human being in here’ (15%) and ‘Generally I fear for my physical safety’ (13%).

Most notably, as shown in Table 2, just under a quarter of prisoners in Norway agreed with the statements ‘My experience in this prison is painful’, ‘This prison is trying to take away my self-respect’ and ‘My treatment in this prison is humiliating’; just under a third agreed that ‘This prison is doing harm to me’; and well over half agreed that ‘My time in this prison feels very much like a punishment’. Overall, then, while the results are indisputably more positive in Norway than in England & Wales—supporting the claim that Norwegian penality is more humane in relative terms—there is no doubt that, in Norway, pain and suffering are still integral to the prisoner experience. In the following sections, we move on from these general results to discuss more specific findings that are particularly germane to debates about Nordic exceptionalism.

All prisons are prisons. You have a rosey imagined image of the Nordic model, probably because you're from a nightmare country that openly and gleefully tortures prisoners (don't worry, I am too), but the reality is that all prisons are punishment. The purpose of a system is what it does. We should strive for a world without prisons.