What we should try to do is examine evidence about what works best, rather than what people who are not experts think is best.
Locking up more people for longer periods in harsher conditions (the favoured Anglo-American policy) is almost certainly not the best possible solution to crime.
Re-offending rates would be an important issue in such an investigation.
Absolutely. The article says:
Alnæs is looking for a researcher to work on this.
I hope some enterprising PhD students in criminology or psychology read this article and take an interest in studying this issue.
Also, are there instances of animal abuse by inmates?
Bastoey also runs education courses and programmes for violent offenders
Do these also use farm animals?
Each prison should strengthen its uniqueness, like Bastoey has done." However, Christie stresses that Bastoey cannot easily be duplicated: "It's a farm in the middle of a fjord. You can't have it in a big city."
So a wide open, natural environment sounds like a requirement. At least in the U.S., this should be doable.
But another factor I am curious about is the cultural/demographic of the prison population. I believe Norwegians are ethnically and culturally very homogeneous, and the culture quite distinct. Sven Triloqvist and Metatone made similar points regarding the Scandinavian so-called flexicurity economic model. Would Bastoey's rehabilitation approach work for a much more diverse and/or culturally different criminal population?
Given that the "prison has run on these principles for about 10 years" and that "in five years, there has been only one escape, and no inmate has ever escaped while on leave", I think it is definitely worth trying. Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire
