Kristian Mjåland. John Pratt and Anna Erikson identified five key elements that constitute the essence of prison systems in the Nordic countries, drawing on comparative research of the penal systems of three Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia, England and New Zealand), and three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden)¹.

First, on average, Nordic prisons are smaller. Then, most have decent material conditions. There is little overcrowding, people are generally placed in individual cells and most cells are equipped with toilets in most prisons. It is quite common in high security facilities for incarcerated people to share a living unit where they have access to a kitchen and a living room. Still, material conditions vary a lot between the Nordic countries and even within each of them. In Norway, for example, some new prisons have decent material standards, while really old ones are in poor condition.

The third observation is that relations between incarcerated people and staff are often less hierarchical, and prison officers are expected to spend a lot of time interacting with them.

They generally receive substantial training. In Norway, this is a two-year programme: they spend one semester at the Prison Officer Academy, they work for a year in prisons under the supervision of experienced prison officers, and then they return to the Academy for a final semester. They are paid for the entirety of the two years. In many countries, the training programme is shorter, such as in England and Scotland where it lasts six to eight weeks.

The last two things concern the provision of education and work opportunities, along with rehabilitation programmes. In most high security prisons, people have access to work opportunities and education. If they meet certain criteria, for instance if they do not have a high school diploma, they are entitled to education in prison, which is provided by public high schools in the community. However, it is important to note that things are definitely not moving in the right direction, at least not in Norway.

Peter Scharff Smith. The very short answer to the question ‘What are Nordic prisons like?’ is that they are like prisons. That being said, some practices are more or less common to all Nordic or Scandinavian prison systems. Among these practices is the principle of normalisation, which is a rights-based approach that involves treating incarcerated persons as citizens and shaping life in prison to resemble life outside prison.² Practical examples include self-catering, which allows people in prison to buy food from the commissaries and prepare their own meals instead of receiving them from the prison administration, or conjugal visits, during which they can meet with their loved ones in private.

Open prisons are another common practice across the Nordic countries. To my knowledge, most prison systems have such facilities, but in Norway and Denmark, a high proportion of prison places are open. In both countries, around a third of all spaces used to be of this type. This proportion has now fallen to a quarter in Denmark. Traditionally, these prisons provide a very different experience both for incarcerated persons and visitors, compared to closed prisons in many countries.

Open prisons in Nordic countries vary greatly from one another. In Norway, Bastøy prison, also known as the “prison island”, is very liberal and open. In constrast, open prisons in Denmark are becoming increasingly restrictive, and they are beginning to resemble closed prisons.

Although Nordic countries have a significant number of open prisons, this model is not unique to the region. A couple of years ago, I visited an open prison in Catalonia, in which nearly all incarcerated people are out all day. It is clearly much more liberal than the typical open prison in the Scandinavian countries and resembles a halfway house in Denmark. A great deal of research has been conducted on Nordic prisons, but no one has yet asked where these practices come from or how they have evolved. Historically, they date back to the 1960s and 1970s: a rights revolution took place during those decades that had a significant impact on prison systems accross the Western world. Much of what we now associate with Nordic prison practices evolved during those decades.

PSS. A lot of research on Nordic prison systems has been initiated by people coming from relatively punitive systems. They were looking for a counter-image to their own institutions and found stark contrasts in Nordic administrations. Sometimes it seems that it was more about demonstrating that their own penitentiary systems were fundamentally flawed, than about understanding Nordic prison systems on their own premises.

It is important to compare prison conditions in a meaningful way. Comparing prisons conditions in a very poor country in the South with those in Norway, one of the richest countries in the world, obviously makes no sense. However, in Western countries, where we could expect a basic level of similarity given that they are reasonably wealthy, the comparison is meaningful. Yet, there is very little comparative research, and none at all comparing Danish and Dutch prisons, for example. This absence of comparative research limits our ability to evaluate whether Nordic prisons are genuinely “exceptional” when considered within their regional and historical contexts.

Simply comparing prison conditions in different jurisdictions, even in similar countries, certainly has its limits. To compare how states use imprisonment, you should ask a slightly different question: what do you lose, or perhaps gain, by being imprisoned in a specific country? What is the difference between being a free citizen and being imprisoned in a given state? You could look at a country in the South and find perhaps horrible prison conditions. However, if you consider that same country and ask what the difference is between a free citizen and an incarcerated one, you may find very different answers. For many people, the difference between being free and being imprisoned might be less significant in some countries than in the Nordic countries, especially given our relatively extensive welfare states.

It is key not only to look at prisons, but also at what happens before and after. Taking a local approach (comparing within a similar context) and a systemic approach (considering prison as part of a system and not an isolated unit) when looking at prisons is obviously a more difficult comparison to make, but a much more meaningful one.

KM. It makes sense that people are looking for positive examples in a world where, in many countries, incarceration rates have risen dramatically since the 1970s and 1980s and onwards, and prison conditions are deteriorating. It is tempting to think that what one country does can be replicated in another. Still, debates about punishment in the Nordic countries have shown us that replication is not straightforward, and that prison conditions also mirror a country’s approach to punishment.

In Norway, for instance, research has shown that the public expects the prison service to focus on rehabilitation. When asked “what do you think that the true purpose of prisons is?”, most Norwegians respond that rehabilitation should be the aim of imprisonment. This is not necessarily how people in other countries would answer.

KM. Norwegian prisons are often labelled ‘model’ or ‘ideal’ facilities, largely due to the perception that they offer more humane conditions of detention. To empirically test this assumption, we compared detention conditions in Norway with those in England and Wales. Our main conclusion is that, while people in Norwegian prisons definitely experience life in prison as hard and painful, the level of pain is significantly higher in England and Wales. The real question here is not whether Norway is a humane prison system, because this would require setting a threshold for what constitutes a human prison.

Prison systems, including the Norwegian and Nordic ones, should not be looked at in absolute terms, but rather in relative terms. It is one thing to say that the Norwegian prison system is humane, but quite another to say, as our study shows, that it seems to be more humane than the one operating in England and Wales.

Still, there have been several significant criticisms of Nordic prison models. The use of isolation and pretrial detention is very widespread: people in pre-trial detention are often locked up under various severe restrictions for extended periods of time. A significant proportion of people in prison are foreign nationals who are not entitled to the same rights as incarcerated national citizens. In Norway in particular, incarceration rates have decreased over the last ten years, yet prison conditions have worsened over that same period. Budget and staff cuts have resulted in serious recruitment problems in many prisons. Rehabilitation opportunities have considerably reduced.

PSS. In Norway, we receive a lot of requests from students and researchers from the United States who want to study our prison system. Many of them say things like: “you have the lowest rate of recidivism in the world, you have fantastic prisons”. I always think: “if our recidivism rate is so low, why do you want to study our prisons?”. We have so many short prison sentences in the Nordic countries. Some of the keys to understanding these rates lie outside the prison itself, in the period after release: is there a system in place to support incarcerated people upon release? To what extent?

If we examine the Scandinavian prison systems, we see that, like other modern prison systems in Europe, North America and some South American countries, they were, to a large extent, designed as a system of isolation. However, isolation prisons and practices were introduced particularly thoroughly in the Scandinavian countries, and this historical reality alone should call the notion of a universal model into question.

As says KM, another important aspect that contrasts sharply with the “model” idea is the use of pre-trial detention and isolation. High levels of isolation and very intrusive prison regimes produce a much more harmful prison experience, especially in Sweden and Denmark. In Denmark, 40% of the prison population is in pre-trial detention.

Meanwhile, several Nordic countries are moving towards more punitive penal policies and more restrictive prison conditions, especially Sweden and Denmark. For the last two decades, Denmark’s “tough on crime” penal policies have had a significant impact on prisons conditions. Open prisons have become more closed, with more intrusive policies and disciplinary punishments, and less focus on rehabilitation and incarcerated people’s rights.

This phenomenon is a more recent development in Sweden, driven by the rise in gang crime and shootings. There are extensive plans to increase the prison population and build more prisons. If these are implemented in the coming years, the situation will be very different from what has been described as “model” or “ideal” prison systems.
While there are certainly “good” practices in Scandinavian prisons that are relevant to observe, this does not imply that the Scandinavian prison model itself should be exported in its entirety.

In my opinion, if you want to reform a country’s prisons, you have to reform the entire system, not only its prisons. This is a very different type of reform project. It requires taking a step back and asking the big questions: what is the purpose of prison reform? How much do we want to rely on imprisonment? This raises an even more uncomfortable question: by focusing on “good practices” to what degree are we then reinforcing the legitimacy of sometimes oppressive institutions?