A Pennsylvania prison is testing a new approach that gives inmates more autonomy and encourages corrections staff to converse with those they oversee. The goals: make conditions in prison safer and better prepare incarcerated people to return to society. The project is inspired by Scandinavian prisons’ focus on rehabilitation. There are practical and cultural challenges to bringing a Scandinavian-inspired approach to the U.S. The model appears to have brought down violence at the Pennsylvania unit, Governing.com reports. Prisons are dangerous places, causing risks not only for prisoners but correctional staff. A few years ago, officials from a state prison in Chester, Pa., visited prisons and training academies in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Norway, recidivism has fallen significantly since the 1980s, when the country shifted its approach from punishment to rehabilitation and reintegration.
Three years ago, the State Correctional Institution in Chester opened a “Little Scandinavia” housing unit. The unit gives people incarcerated there more freedoms and responsibilities, a physical space redesigned to feel more like normal life and an environment that encourages respectful relationship-building among inmates and between prisoners and staff. Changes aimed to make the unit stop feeling like a highly institutionalized setting and more like a group house. Residents would get more freedoms and handle more of the tasks they’d need to do in daily life on the outside. sidents got a cell to themselves, rather than sharing. The unit was given a full kitchen where residents could cook their own meals and a washer-dryer for doing their own laundry. The team swapped out metal and plastic furniture for furniture made with wood and fabric and added sound-dampening panels, planters and other features to encourage incarcerated people to spend time in the public space and socialize. The goal was to prepare incarcerated people for life outside, reduce stress on everyone and create security through personal connections rather than tight containment. Staff are less likely to be attacked by incarcerated people who see them as a person, rather than as just an instrument of the larger carceral machine, says Jordan Hyatt, a criminologist at Drexel University who co-leads research studying the reform efforts at the Little Scandinavia unit.
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