Vegarbeid

Okay, I gathered my thoughts about this, and I will try to lay out an answer. The intention of the imprisonment itself is a mixture of different factors. One factor is to protect society from further crimes, another factor is to show the society that lawless behaviour wont go unsanctioned (even though many people get away with criminal actions). Further more, as the prisons in Norway has developed, we have taken one step further and told ourself, by law and by common consensus that the time in prison shall not only be a place to throw away time, but to also be productive in some sort of way. We also have a lot of common wealth at our disposal through our nations oil business. With this being said, one should think that staying in a Norwegian prison would be like a "hotel", or that it is better to be in prison than being poor outside of prison. That is not true. We try to help our inmates as much as we can, but the states creative solutions around rehabilitating seems to have stagnated. Along comes the financial plans and economic strategies towards prisons. "They are as good as they need to be", I can hear people say. This might be true, concidered other nations prison conditions, but compared to what we could have achieved in Norwegian prisons, there are always room for improvement. One of the biggest issues with the balance between the punishment and the rehabilitation is the worn down mentality of the oldest CO's, and the elder generation of the administration and politicians. We deal out drugs (medicine) to addicts, and they get addicted to the medicine, in addition to the street heroine. We give psychiatric help to those in need with suicidal thoughts, but only on wednesdays. We will give you work after your prison time, but only if you accept to work for the lowest wage possible.

I guess my frustration goes out on how the same inmates come in and get out again, several times a year, for small narcotic cases, and causes lots of state cost. We treat drug addicts the same way we treat violent criminals. We dont separate thieves from child abusers. I think that to achieve successful therapy, it needs to be outside the prison walls. Especially for drug addicts. They need not to be sanctioned with prison time, just pure rehabilitiation. We need a fragmation of how we treat our criminals. Sorry for the long and messy answer, I gave up trying to structure it. Have a good evening, gents!

This is will require some thought, and I promise I will come back to you with an adequate answer. EDIT: I just made up some thoughts about this, here https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pcfmf/i_work_as_a_correctional_officer_in_a_high/cw5lgeb

Norway has about 4000 inmates at all times, distributed into 45 different prisons nation wide. That is very few compared to many other countries. The low rate of violence inside the prisons is based on two things as I see it;

1. The structural aspect: Every cell in Norway is an one-inmate individual cell. This makes the cell violence/killings lower. We generally separate all inmates in few-populated wards by 20 individuals.
2. The trust aspect: We are giving our inmates a lot of autonomy, and by giving them responsibilites such as jobs and free education, we generate a more friendly bond. There are also strict sanctioning systems if they do brake the rules, such as withdrawal of visiting hours and access to recreational activities.

Despite being a high security prison, nearly all wards have recreational spaces with couches, chessboards and a well functioning kitchen and lots of refridgerators for their food bought from the in-prison grocery shop. We are trying to imitate the outside world, for rehabilitation purposes.

My most enjoyable experience so far is making heroine addicts smile and laugh through a game of cards, and making reflexive conversations with hard criminals about their own identity and moral ground.

1. Being attacked by an inmate with two pointy pieces of a snapped wooden broomstick.
2. With mandatorial monitoring of outgoing phone calls, being forced to shut down the inmates private phone calls with their children, due to strict telephone time limits. It herts my hert.