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When most people picture U.S. prisons, they don’t usually imagine green plants, vibrant murals, wooden furniture, cuddly dogs or fish tanks. In most facilities, they’d be right.
But at SCI Chester, a medium-security prison outside Philadelphia, a small pilot unit known as “Little Scandinavia” is testing whether that kind of environment, modeled on the prisons of Nordic countries like Norway and Denmark, can not only change how prisons look, but also how they work.
The unit, opened in 2022, was created through a partnership between the state corrections department, Drexel University and the University of Oslo in Norway. Its premise is simple, if radical, by U.S. standards: Prisons should primarily focus on preparing people to successfully reenter society — rather than on punishment.
Last month, Pennsylvania corrections Secretary Laurel Harry announced that the state would expand its Scandinavian-inspired approach to three new facilities. The move came after a randomized study at SCI Chester showed promising early results. The unit has seen just a single physical altercation since opening, and according to Harry, staff have reported a greater “sense of purpose.”
“It’s a whole different vibe,” one man incarcerated in the unit told Penn Live last year. “It’s more of a community.” Officers in the unit are trained to act more as mentors than as guards, and people incarcerated there are encouraged to build informal relationships with staff in ways that are often against the rules or norms in typical prison environments.
California, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with a more financially ambitious vision for Nordic-inspired prison reform. While the 64-bed Chester unit cost Pennsylvania just $310,000 to set up, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is spending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to remake San Quentin State Prison into a Scandinavian-style “rehabilitation center” to house upwards of 2,500 people. The rebranded facility will include vocational training hubs, a podcast studio, a farmer’s market and a self-serve grocery store. Construction has already begun at San Quentin, and the unit is scheduled to open in January. The new facility represents a flashy centerpiece in a broader, system-wide shift toward rehabilitation, dubbed “the California Model.”
Reaction to the San Quentin project has been mixed. One of the most outspoken critics of the effort has been Steve Brooks, an incarcerated journalist at the prison. He wrote that even at its best, the redesign would not scale to California’s massive prison system or meaningfully affect most people inside it. Brooks argued the state should instead be focused on closing prisons and reinvesting the savings “towards reentry programs, job training, housing assistance, education grants, mental health support, substance abuse treatment and more,” a position echoed by some prison abolitionists when the question of Nordic-style prisons comes up.
Earlier this month, Brooks claimed in a personal essay that his writing questioning the effort ultimately cost him his job as editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News.
Some victims' rights groups have also come out against the effort, arguing that the state should instead spend the money on victims’ services. The efforts have split conservative observers, with some accusing liberal politicians of “putting criminals ahead of law-abiding citizens,” and others expressing support. Noting that 95% of people in prison are ultimately released, columnist Steven Greenhut reasoned earlier this month: “If someone from San Quentin moved into your neighborhood, would you want that person to have spent the past 10 years fighting for his life as part of a skinhead gang or someone who had spent the time attending classes, gardening, and playing ping pong?”
The state correctional union has offered guarded support for the changes, despite the hesitation of the state’s correctional staff. Last week, the Sacramento Bee reported that staff buy-in remains the “biggest obstacle” to the rollout. Some corrections officers have alleged that the new freedoms awarded to incarcerated people “created more dangerous situations.”
Other officers see major promise in the new California approach. Officer Richard Kruse told the Los Angeles Times last summer that he was “stoked” about the changes and embraced a role on San Quentin’s “resource team” to help with the intended cultural shift. Kruse has embraced board and video games as a tool for modeling social behavior. “They’re gonna leave someday. That’s going to be your neighbor, might be your family member’s neighbor,” Kruse told the Times. “Those guys, if I can work with [them] to make [them] better, that, to me, is what it’s about.”
In Connecticut — home to another small-scale Nordic reform effort — supporters of the approach suggest that a more humane environment could have material benefits for corrections officers. “You’re doing this for the incarcerated, but you’re also doing this for your colleagues,” trainer Kevin Reeder says he tells skeptical officers, who find it hard to shake the belief that prison “should feel like a prison.” Reeder works with the nonprofit Amend, one of the primary groups pushing to integrate these kinds of models in U.S. prisons. He reminds the trainees that “they, too, do time” in the facility and that the harsh, unforgiving environment may contribute to the profession’s high rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide and shortened life expectancy.
But even in the countries that inspired these reforms, sustaining them has proven difficult. Understaffing in Norway's prisons has led to people being locked in their cells for up to 22 hours a day, and the suspension of programming while staff is reassigned to guard duty. Danish prisons, meanwhile, are over capacity thanks in part to new, longer sentences for some violent crimes, according to researcher Kaigan Carrie, writing for The Conversation.
“The Nordic countries still provide a source of inspiration regarding their smaller prison populations and more humane approaches to imprisonment,” Carrie concludes. “But as political views on crime and punishment evolve, they are clearly not immune from the problems” facing prison systems around the world.