'I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body . . .because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.' - Charles Dickens after visiting the US' Eastern Penitentiary in 1842, just 50 years after prisons were formulated in America.
'The prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time' - Elliott Currie in 1998, Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine
'The main rule in Section 17 of the Norwegian Penal Code is that all inmates in Norwegian prisons should, as far as practically possible, be allowed company of other inmates and officers during work, training, programming, and in their leisure periods. This basically means access to community and social contact with other prisoners all day, from morning to evening' - Jules Lobel, professor of International and Constitutional Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. and Peter Scharff Smith, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Denmark, in 2019.
'Detention must be carried out such that it, to the greatest possible degree, reflects conditions in the free world, to prepare the inmate for life after release and to counteract the harmful effects of imprisonment.' - The original 1951 Norwegian 'Normality Principle'.
'The punishment is the restriction of liberty; no other rights have been removed by the sentencing court. Therefore the sentenced offender has all the same rights as all other who live in Norway. No-one shall serve their sentence under stricter circumstances than necessary for the security in the community. Therefore, offenders shall be placed in the lowest possible security regime.' - The current 'Principle of Normality' set by the Norwegian Correctional Service.
Rehabilitation over punishment must come first
Why the differing incarceration and recidivism rates of criminals in the United States and Norway since the 80s are so important.
In 2020, Norway's GDP per capita for 2020 was $68,340 whilst the US U.S. GDP per capita was $63,529. Individuals from the country were comparatively equally wealthy. Yet in 2020, the US had one of highest percentage of incarcelated individuals per 100,000 of the world (505 - a record low for the US since 1992) whilst Norway had only has a 10th of the US incarceration rate that year (54). In 2018, the US had the highest incarceration rate in the world at 642.
The differing recidivism rates (which show how many people go back to prison for new crimes after completing their original sentences) and recidivism rate trends since the 1980s are even more telling and explain exactly why Norway have a tenth of the US' incarceration rate. A 2021 study conducted by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that '66% of people released from prison in 24 different states in 2008 were re-arrested within three years. At the decade mark, 82% had been re-arrested.' By contrast, a 2014 Pell Centre for International relations and public policy report revealed Norway had a recidivism rate almost a third of the US's - 'only 20% of Norway's formerly incarcerated population commit another crime within two years of release. Even after five years, the recidivism rate is only 25%' Whilst the parallel recidivism rate in the United States by the same study was 52%.
What makes this so profound is that Norway wasn't always so much better than the US . In Norway around the early 80s ' 63% of those given “unconditional” prison sentences re-offended within five years of being released. For people with three or more previous sentences, the re-offense rate was closer to 80%.’ Whilst, even in the 90s, 'roughly 70% of all released prisoners recommitted crimes within two years of release. That rate is nearly equal to the recidivism rate in the United States today.' Norway tackled its prison problem through focusing on rehabilitation and criminal care, and thanks to political reforms - the Stoltenberg government in 2005 especially saw projects related to criminal justice and correctional services as top priority. From the 1980s the criminal justice picture in the US equally drastically changed, just in the polar opposite direction. In 2017 there were well over two million people in prison and jails, a '500 percent increase over the last forty years'. Overall, the 'US has almost 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of its prisoners.'
This has come at enormous cost. Take California for example, in over a hundred years, between 1852 and 1955, just nine prisons were constructed. Yet later in just five years, between 1984 and 1989, nine prisons were created in California and during the 1990s, twelve new prisons opened there. The prison industry completely restructured and exploded after the Reagan administration began their war on drugs in 1982, when he declared illicit drugs to be a threat to U.S. national security, around the time many prison sentences got considerably lengthened and many crimes became punishable by certain imprisonment. It is clear that crime continued to run riot in the US despite such touch measures and political seriousness about cutting crime, given afterwards official crime rates didn't decrease, instead there were only more and more criminals getting caught and being sent to prison. By contrast, Knut Storberget, a former Norwegian Minister of Justice demonstrated tremendous softness and moved to tears a heroin addict named Trond Henriksen who had 'kidnapped a policeman and a security officer when he tried to escape from jail as a 26-year-old drug addict with several robberies on his record' but who vowed to be clean, by telling him afterwards - “You know Trond, you shall not be ashamed. The most human thing to do is to fail. You must never forget that!".
The key to Norway's success in rehabilitation is that whilst criminals are deprived of freedom and publicly shamed they are otherwise treated with respect, and in every other way granted the human rights and emotional support a free-man is granted; whereas in the US prisons, which are more and more privately run with less and less money spent per prisoner on their care and well-being, prisoners are overly punished - solitary confinement, a punishment known to break minds. for instance is common, and prisoners are deprived of almost all basic rights other than to eat and sleep - for instance to read. Consider one of America's greatest real life prison redemption characters Malcolm X and what would have happened if he was not allowed to read. Norway is pretty unique in its strict following of the 'Principle of Normality' meaning prisoners must like the rest of the public have access to public services like health-care, libraries and schools and that prisons import all these service providers. It is even more unique in that guards are encouraged to co-live and get to know well and support emotionally prisoners. Whilst Norway's prisons are typically better and better kept with inmates even playing football with guards, in the US educational programs for prisoners have been increasingly disestablished and weights and bodybuilding equipment have been increasingly removed from most U.S. prisons. Almost always, US guards are instructed to never trust a criminal and always remain detached, so as to not put danger on themselves. Prisoners in Norway have voting rights from prison, whilst in the US among over a dozen states, even out of prison 'millions of Americans are excluded from our democratic process on the basis of criminal disenfranchisement laws. These laws strip voting rights from people with past criminal convictions, and they vary widely between states.' Only in Columbia, Maine and Vermont are prisoners in prison eligible to vote, in 23 others they are banned.
Norwegian inmates are sent to serve their sentences as close to their own homes as possible and permitted contact with their family and friends as much as is reasonable, sometimes even being permitted privacy of a house inside the prison. In US prisons, despite it being illegal, it is known substance-abuse is rife. This is known too in Norway, the difference being that those Norwegian prisoners that need them all have access to substance-abuse units, and those that relapse can start a course from close to where they left-off, not from scratch if they ever return to prison as a result. Even after serving criminal sentences, Norway is softer than other countries to criminals. Norwegian courts do not permit prisoner-release to homelessness and local authorities have a duty to aid their return into the community, usually supported in tandem by volunteers. Above all, convicted people do not need to mention their previous conviction in job applications in Norway (except for professions where good conduct is required). It is worth saying that Norwegian prisons aren't an actual fairy-tale or mascaraed for a total abolition of prisons. The book 'Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice' notes ‘foreign researchers reacting with a certain disappointment after visiting progressive, seemingly exceptional and initially very humane-looking Scandinavian institutions, when discovering that, after all, these places are still prisons, places of detention where people are deprived of their liberty and subjected to strict rules and regulations.’ Moreover, the December 2022 book 'The Norwegian Prison System: Halden Prison and Beyond' by Are Høidal and Nina Hanssen that so heavily influenced this blog clarifies that 'there has been a shift in political direction in Norway with the conservative government between 2016–2020, with fat cuts and more privatization and less resources for the public sector, but still the Nordic welfare model is strong and so is the prison service.' Overall, whilst of course the two cultures may be very different to begin with and comparisons not entirely fair, it is without doubt which method is working best, adopted by one country, and which has completely failed, adopted by the other, after looking at the statistics on the incarceration and recidivism rates of criminals in each one.
The modern prison system's worrying international direction and how it came about?
Why how prison's came about in the US is so important - empathy and racism combine.
There are two main reasons why it is important to think about the emergence of prisons in the US. First and foremost, they came about as a result of empathy - prior prisons criminals were overly punished - crimes such as theft were punishable by death. In fact, before prisons Britain had created an arrangement for similar reasons to exile British criminals in America for several years, so that they need not be hanged for stealing a silver spoon for instance. This was the Transportation Act passed in 1718. Crimes were punished by the most mistaken and cruel, with the cruelest severity, in England- being a heretic led to being burnt alive and sodomy to being buried alive, for example. Torture was common. England and European countries were the first to employ prison as a principal way of punishing criminals in the 18th century. Thus, prisons came about primarily as an empathetic relief, exactly around the time slavery was being abolished and when capital punishment was being less extremely administered. Another reasons prisons came about first in Europe was also to aid colonial rule, especially in Asia and Africa. In the the late 18th century, prisons arrived in America, and they are therefore associated with resistance to the colonial power of England as the first was opened in 1785, the Massachusetts state prison, very shortly after the time of the American Revolution. This is vital to consider, since prisons were considered softer punishment and the world was becoming softer and crimes were being treated with more of a spectrum of punishments.
This leads to the second key point, there was tremendous backlash to the emergence of prisons, particularly by slave-owners when slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, preceded by the UK in 1833. They were appeased by the fact the slave trade in the US was partially replaced by the prison system where forced-labour was legal. From the very beginning African Americans were the ones most imprisoned- 'fifteen years after slavery was abolished, one in five New York prisoners would be black, their representation behind bars nearly ten times greater than it was in the population at large.' Quickly those who complained previously were now happy profiteers, and there is no doubt forced labour could be more productive than consensual labour - motivated by the pursuit of freedom and without human rights 'an enslaved person in an antebellum cotton field picked around 75 percent more cotton per hour than a free farmer.' In fact criminals were so productive for say mining companies like the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company and profitable to the prison corporations who leased them for 'up to $18.50 per month per man' that sentences were made longer to please both free parties at criminal's expense. As Shane Bauer writes in 'American prison - a reporter's undercover journey into the business of punishment', 'for much of America’s history, racism, captivity, and profit were intertwined. Slavery, the root of anti black racism in America, was a for-profit venture. When slavery ended, powerful interests immediately devised a way to continue profiting from the captive bodies of African Americans and other poor people.'
Is the US' criminal justice system still systematically racist?
Whist I think it's fair to question that police and jury racism is exaggerated by the media and divisive corporate movements such as Black Lives Matters (though existent clearly), the law is most certainly racist and that's where the core problems lies. This is told by the numbers. Take California, a liberal left-wing part of America - in 2002, there were 20,000 out of a total 157,979 total people incarcerated in the state for immigration violations that slightly balloons the following numbers. Nevertheless, Latinos accounted for the majority imprisoned at 35.2%, African American's second at 30%, white prisoners at 29.2%. It is true that in 2002, only half of California's population was white, non-Hispanic (actually less - 46%) but still those figures are very disproportionate. A major cause is sociological and economic, it is even arguable that in some black, Latino, and Native American poor communities, people are more likely to go to prison than of getting a decent education, and that is not coincidental. Poverty creates crime far more than genetics, but unfortunately in the US the poor are some of the most punished in the world by prisons. As Angela Davis writes in 'Are Prisons Obsolete?' -'in 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project published a study of U.S. populations in prison and jail, and on parole and probation, which concluded that one in four black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were among these numbers. Five years later, a second study revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in three (32.2 percent)'. That is systematic racism, and can only be changed by changing the laws.' She continues noting Elliot Currie's findings that 'the prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.' Her book was published in 2003 so that is staggering.
The emergence and sudden rise of popularity of super-maximum security (Supermax) prisons, corporate private prisons and women prisons post 1980 in the US and globally.
Supermax prisons
Inmates in super-maximum security facilities are usually held in single cell lock-
down, commonly referred to as solitary confinement . . . Congregate activities with
other prisoners are usually prohibited; other prisoners cannot even be seen from an
inmate's cell; communication with other prisoners is prohibited or difficult (consisting, for example, of shouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephone privileges are
limited. - 1997 Human Rights Watch report.
The era of the modern “supermax” began in 1979, when the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) designated a special “level 6” security category for USP Marion, in southern Illinois. Although, not massive, a considerable amount of individuals are now housed in Supermax, around 1 in fifty criminals. The reason why this matters so much is in supermax prisons, prisoners bar a few times a week when they are permitted to shower and solitary exercise, are left trapped in pure solitary confinement - a torture know to break minds through loneliness. Many prisoners may be starved off natural light in windowless cells. There are dozens of supermax prisons in almost every state of the the US and worse, they are spreading globally. Take the UK, where are 8 supermax prisons: HMP Belmarsh (the first supermax in the UK and where Julian Assange was chillingly sent), Frankland, Full Sutton, Long Lartin, Manchester, Wakefield, Whitemoor and Woodhill. Frankly, in the modern era these prisons need to shut down or be modified completely as their focus is entirely on punishment and not at all on rehabilitation. Rehabilitation requires care for mental illnesses as if they were physical ones and in 2004-5, it was found that found that in the United States there are were more than three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in psychiatric and other types of mental-health hospitals. Nothing can be worse for the mentally ill than years of solitary confinement. It has been shown 'prisoners confined in such facilities spent an average of twenty-three hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme social isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily limited recreational and educational opportunities.
The Prison Industrial Complex and private, corporate prisons
'For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organising. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria's Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of free labor.'
The relationship encompassing the exploitation of prison labor by private corporations constitutes what we now call a prison industrial complex, very much like how the earliest prisons replicated the slave trade. Sadly, like supermax prisons, this issue is not only existent in the United States, but in Europe, South America, Australia, and across the world. Not only are corporations profiting of prisoners from free labour but they are typically paid per prisoner, meaning they are profit-motivated by the expansion of imprisonment not the cutting of crime. Recidivism in other words is good business, as are harsh, long sentences. It is unfortunate that they have so lazily been put in place under the pretext private is much more effective than public financially, which is false. According to the US Department of Justice themselves 'private prisons 'do not save substantially on costs' and those small savings exist only largely through 'moderate reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs'.
It is almost inevitable that corporations have got greedier and run lower-standard prisons with less and less criminal care, especially by large prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wakenhut that control over three-quarters of private prisons globally - 'The cost per prisoner at Winn (A CCA prison), adjusted for inflation, dropped nearly 20 percent between the late nineties and 2014. CCA will report $1.8 billion in revenue, making more than $221 million in net income — more than $3,300 for each prisoner in its care.'
Woman prisons
'For most of the period after World War II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000, it did not reach double digits until 1977. Today it is 51 per 100,000... At the current rates there will be more women in American prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970.' - Angela Davis 2003
Bear in mind prison experience was rare until the late 1970s as previously women had been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons, and more so than men in polar opposite to the prisons. As Angela Davis writes '' However, after the 1970s the trend completely reversed, and the trend is shown to be very extreme by comparing woman incarceration rate growth (60%) with men incarceration rate growth which has also happened (22%) but at a third of the speed since 2000 - the questions only really are, when will it even out and why the explosion?
Analysing the jury system - why forensic technology "scientific experts" send inadvertently so many innocent civilians to prisons, or visa-versa (it is not like the TV).
The US jury system came about as a result of the British Jury system leading the way, and in a 1968 case titled 'Duncan v. Louisiana' the 'US Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required states to provide juries in serious cases, later defined as those cases with a potential sentence of more than six months.' Thus juries are at the heart of the modern American system, and they are futher used internationally in other former British colonies such as New Zealand, Australia as well as more than 40 other countries. Thus, prosecutions must prove guilt to ten out of twelve people in modern juries, who are detached from political pressure and not blinded by the cynicism judges may pick up if over-worked. Juries are particularly good at reading personal witness statements and following stories, but they have one significant weakness - they are mostly rubbish at analysing sophisticated scientific evidence and expect to see it (like in the movies and TV series). How long out-dated and false forensic science can be taken seriously in courts for is scary. Microscopic Hair Analysis, first used in murder cases in 1934 and made a standard practise used by the FBI from the 1970s, was only discredited around 2015. But the bigger question is why was it discredited? Well the FBI themselves, found after conducting a Microscopic Hair Comparison Analysis Review by analyzing trial transcripts that 'at least 90 percent of the reviewed transcripts contained erroneous statements. Twenty-six of twenty-eight FBI hair analysts provided either erroneous statements or erroneous reports... Thirty-three of the thirty-five death penalty cases in the study included false statements. The “science” of microscopic hair analysis was so faulty that, in at least one case, the examiner matched the DNA of human hair to what was later proven to be dog hair.'
Bullet lead analysis, previously taken as scientifically dependable enough by the FBI so as to be fundamental in one of the most famous criminal cases in the world - the one on assassination of President Kennedy - where testimonies from experts on metal compositions of bullets were used to determine whether there was a second shooter - was discontinued as standard prosecuting evidence used by the FBI in 2005. Bullet lead analysis flaws are gaping - 'bullets are made from giant caldrons of molten metals, and millions of bullets are made from the same batch. Bullets from within that batch can be indistinguishable and, based on the tests that the FBI was conducting, the same conclusion could be drawn about bullets from other batches.'
Jurors don't truly have sufficient levels of scientific education to be able to properly understand scientific evidence and complicated scientific terminology presented to them and so over-rely, over-value and trust 'expert testimonies' when making judgements, holding scientific credentials. Yet, he science being peddled in reality is far from sure and trustworthy in most cases and actual scientists and forensic experts acknowledge this (for example, in 2009 the National Academy of Science issued a report criticizing multiple questionable forensic sciences). Sadly though the public (who make up juries) get their idea of reality more from TV shows like criminal minds - it is a tragic situation, as it results in so many innocent people being sent to jail or guilty ones being let off. Forensic evidence of gun shells casings for instance has been popularised ever since used to catch Al Capone, but there are two reasons little known why matching spent shell cases collected at crime scenes to guns can lead to flawed convictions and are almost always insufficient evidence by themselves to convict anyone. Unlike in the days of Al Capone when gunmetal was hammered by hand making every gun's casing probably unique, slick modern machines are now used to produce various types of guns that could all have the same type of casing, and as they mass produced, even would leave hundreds of guns with the same anomalies depending if the machine did have a unique feature and only produced one sort of gun. Secondly, the ability to make microscopic comparisons of the marks on the casings and match them depends on the analyst’s technical expertise.
Jurors, due to their own lack of scientific pedigree, seemingly forget that scientists are most certainly susceptible to human biases and make mistakes themselves, when they place far more weight on scientific evidence than they should, considering they don't really understand the science enough to be able to question the scientist well. Consider, a study titled - 'Cognitive bias in forensic anthropology: Visual assessment of skeletal remains is susceptible to confirmation bias.' In the study, a skeleton was presented to forty-one experienced forensic scientists (who were split up into three groups). The skeleton hard to judge and with some ambiguous features but deemed most likely female, and in the group told it was most likely female all of the forensic scientists agreed with that verdict. However, in the group not told that the skeleton was likely to be either gender, only 69% thought it was female. In the group told the skeleton was likely male, only 28% disagreed it was female. Another study titled 'Contextual information renders experts vulnerable to making erroneous identifications', on Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints - which had been falsely matched by an FBI analyst to the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 193 people and injured almost 2000 (the fingerprints were later matched to another individual - Ouhnana Daoud who was convicted for the crime) showed how fingerprint experts were unreliable when given contextual misinformation. Five experts with eighty-five years experience between them falsely led to believe they were comparing Mayfield's fingerprints to the ones found on the scene of the bombing, knowing those shouldn't match despite another FBI expert saying they did. In reality they were just re-presented with the very same pairs of fingerprints that the same experts had originally evaluated to be a match. Four of them changed their opinion without realising they were analysing the same fingerprints, and only one said they actually matched. In every forensic field, susceptibility to bias made by context has been proven - such as was shown by a 2011 study titled 'Subjectivity and bias in forensic DNA mixture interpretation' and a 2014 study titled 'Reliability Assessment of Current Methods in Bloodstain Pattern Analysis' for example.
In his book 'You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent' Justin Brooks argues in a chapter titled 'You Got a Jury That Was Blinded by “Science” that the following issues lie in the various forensic fields studied to judge crime, as shown by previous cases in the US. One famous case of an innocent man being sent to jail and sentenced to death row over false Dental Identification was Ray Krone, previously known as the 'Snaggle Tooth Killer'. He was released after 10 years when DNA testing proved his innocence. Moreover, ven the very best forensic dental experts have been shown to make mistakes. As far as experience goes, Norman Sperber was arguably the leading forensic dentist in the world on the front. He was the chief forensic dentist at the California Department of Justice, and developed a unique and world-leading Californian Dental Identification System. The SPD Police Museum describe how -'during his long, distinguished career, Dr. Sperber testified to forensic evidence in more than 215 trials and has examined evidence in the Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer cases. He also spent time at ground zero, helping identify the victims of the 911 terrorist attacks where his expert assistance helped identify 1500 of the 3000 plus victims.' However, even he sent innocent men to jail through expert testimonies. Take Bill Richards for example, who Norman Sperber only gave between 1-2% of being innocent based on dental evidence, and who was wrongly convicted right afterwards for beating his wife to death.
Another famous case, showing that leading forensic experts can be wrong or show their fields to be wrong was the case against Gerald Lewis accused for murder of his pregnant wife and four children through arson. John Lentini, one of the US' leading experts in Fire Investigation who admitted based on routine evidence shown by a Jacksonville Fire Department report, he 'thought the fire was intentionally set (and) had come within 24 hours of giving testimony that could well have sent an innocent person to Florida's electric chair'. However, after conducting experiments both he and his colleagues were left surprised that the fire could have arisen from the heat source (temed as "flashovers") in just over four minutes, when it was previously expected to take 15-20 minutes, proving Lewis innocent. Lentini was left 'chastened by the experience' and was 'derided and demeaned by many fire investigators who would have gone forward with the case even with the test results we had'. Even after the case against Lewis, the same faulty fire science sent innocent people to prison such as JoAnn Parks in 1993 who spent 29 years behind bars for murder of her three children over an accidental fire wrongly believed to have been deliberate.
Fingerprint Identification systems and DNA matching are more dependable forensic sciences than all the ones mentioned above, but are still far from perfect. As one FBI study of fingerprint examiners revealed - '85 percent of 169 examiners made at least one false-negative error.' False positives also can occur. Whilst DNA is pretty definitive, unless there are evil twins involved, Brooks writes 'even DNA evidence is still subject to human error, and it’s only as good as (1) the people who gather the biological material to be tested; (2) the people who do the testing; and (3), the people who evaluate the results... Contamination, for example, is a serious problem with DNA result (that) can happen anywhere along the chain of custody of evidence, from the scene of the crime, to the lab, to the courtroom... And then there are the officers who are not merely incompetent, but instead intentionally fabricate evidence.' Lastly, and similarly Lab Fraud exists. One highly reputed American DNA analyst, Fred Zain, was found guilty of lab frauds that mean according to criminal investigations he alone 'may have been responsible for wrongfully convicting hundreds of people'. Brooks writes that 'in 2022, Massachusetts settled a lawsuit for $14,000,000 with more than thirty-one thousand criminal defendants whose cases were tainted by a crime lab scandal.'
Overall, the fact that the prison system is so systematically racist, and does inevitably result in many innocent people getting wrongfully convicted, means punishment should be much more centred globally on the Norwegian model than the US based model, particularly the supermax one. Rehabilitation over punishment and profit must come first.
References
(1) 'You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent', Justin Brooks, 2023
(2) Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis, 2003
(3) American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, Shane Bauer, 2018
(4) The Norwegian Prison System: Halden Prison and Beyond, Are Høidal, 2022
(5) The US Has the Highest Recidivism Rates In the World—Here’s Why, Ashley M. Biggers, 2024, https://www.success.com/recidivism-rates/
(6) What We Can Learn From Norway’s Prison System: Rehabilitation & Recidivism, First Step Alliance, 2022, https://www.firststepalliance.org/post/norway-prison-system-lessons
(7) COLD STORAGE Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana, 1997, https://www.hrw.org/reports/1997/usind/
(8) Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex, HISTORY IS A WEAPON, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html
