Culture: The Danish Prison System

(*The following is a post made up of information I have gathered from news articles, readings, and class lectures. I cannot guarantee that the information is 100% correct, as I may have misunderstood or been unintentionally misled, but I am quite sure that it is mostly accurate. Please excuse any potential errors. After digesting all the information, I am still left with questions and debates. However, I don’t know it all and I have written all I know, so if you’re curious about more or if you are questioning a fact, I’d suggest doing your own research on it.)

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Introduction and Comparison of US and DK Punishment Systems

We’ve recently been talking about crime and punishment in Denmark in my Danish class. To say the least, the prison system (like many aspects of the country) in Denmark is shockingly different from in the US , and it was really interesting to learn about.

In Denmark, there are two types of prisons: open prisons and closed prisons. Closed prisons are for criminals with sentences over 5 years, and are obviously more secure/strict than open prisons, which are for criminals with sentences under 5 years. The majority of prisons in Denmark are open ones, and inmates in open prisons have a remarkable amount of liberties:

• The ‘prison cells’ that criminals in open prisons live in often include a private kitchen, bathroom, TV, bed, and more
• Families of the prisoners can live with them if they have a child that is under 3 years old
• They can have jobs, such as driving a van, which are not always overseen by guards
• The state will pay your rent while you’re in prison so you have a place to come back to once you’re out
• *I’d highly recommend watching the Youtube video below to really get an image of all of the freedoms granted to prisoners in Danish open prisons!

Here are some stats comparing the US’ and Denmark’s prison systems :

• Amount of People Incarcerated
  • US:
    • Though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, it is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population (Source)
    • 716 people are incarcerated per 100,000 of the national population (Source)
  • Denmark
    • 73 people are incarcerated per 100,000 of national population (Source)
•  Recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend)
  • US: The last study on recidivism in the USA revealed that 77% of state prisoners who were released in 2005 were re-arrested by 2010, with 43 percent of those going back inside within the first year of their release (Source)
  • Denmark: ~27% (Source)
• Cost
  • Running the US prison system costs roughly 80 billion USD a year
  •  Running the Danish prison system costs roughly 460 million USD per year (Source)
  • *Yes, it is important to note that the countries vary quite significantly in size, but still, that’s a big difference in cost…

A Sort of Case Study

Check out this 12-min long Youtube video for an inside look at a Danish inmate in an open prison for drug dealing and his life there:

 

To me, the prison in the video resembles the living place of a college student who has curfew and a job and a few other rules to abide by. It’s notably different to us Americans who are used to bars, chains, concrete, jumpsuits, and extreme authority/superiority complexes in our prisons.

Despite its differences, this system makes so much sense in Denmark because, as I’ve written before, the Danish way based so heavily and deeply on trust. My Danish professor explained to us that this system is also based heavily on goals of reformation with the belief that criminals being treated with dignity and like a human being will lower the likelihood for the felon to cause trouble in prison and commit future crimes. As explained in the Youtube video, there are of course imperfections to this system, but it has undoubtedly led to lower recidivism, which should be one the crime & punishment system’s biggest goal in my opinion.

As always, downsides…

Some imperfections of the system:

• All convicted criminals (rapists, attempted murderers, child molesters and all) will be in open prisons if their sentences are for less than 5 years
• There are 16 years maximum sentences in Denmark, no matter the crime; no life-sentences
  • People with severe mental issues after being released from prison may be sent to a center rather than just released into the world again
• State paying for ‘bad’ people’s liberties, rent at home, etc.
• Drugs are still often smuggled into the prison system

Another Study

Below I’ve copied and pasted a Washington Post article from February 2, 2016 written by Keramet Relter, Lori Sexton, and Jennifer Sumner that we were assigned to read for class which summarizes and compares the prison system in Denmark really well: (source)

“The most interesting thing about Scandinavian prisons? Many are barely prisons at all.

Our research team spent six weeks conducting intensive research in Danish prisons. We were struck by the sight of prisoners wearing their own clothes, cooking their own meals and having private family visits as often as once a week. At these “open” prisons, there are no barbed wire fences, solid walls with gun towers or secure perimeters. Instead, prison officials allow for the possibility that a prisoner might escape. Better that than a prisoner take a staff member hostage trying to breach a secure perimeter, they explain.

As we shared meals with prisoners and with staff and observed their days, we noticed something else more surprising: Danish prison officials assume some prisoners will get in fights, smuggle in drugs, commit suicide or escape. They expect and accept imperfections in their system. Their response to these unpleasant, unsanctioned events is rarely a crackdown, a drastic change in policy or even a public apology. For instance, even though prison officials know that drugs are smuggled into prisons through various body cavities, they do not conduct searches of prisoners or prison visitors. Prison officials prioritize dignity over implementing more stringent drug enforcement policies.

Likewise, when one prisoner stabbed another with a knife in a communal kitchen where prisoners prepare their own meals, prison officials responded by anchoring each knife to the wall with a foot-long steel cord. Then a prisoner used a vegetable peeler to stab another prisoner. So officials anchored the vegetable peeler to the wall, too. Prison officials prioritize prisoner independence over implementing stricter violence reduction policies, like removing the knives entirely.

One senior prison official in Denmark described a recent escape to us: A prisoner in the country’s highest security prison got access to a burqa from a visitor, put it on and walked out of the prison. He was never found. The prison official speculated that the escaped prisoner returned to his home country of Morocco. The media covered the escape, but the stories were funny. As the head of the prison guards union in Denmark said: “If you want to, you can escape … if you take that away … you will get a much harder prison.”

And, in truth, mistakes are rare. In 2014, only one prisoner escaped from a “closed” Danish prison with a secure perimeter. Of the 60,000 prisoner leaves granted each year in Denmark, only 3 percent either violate the terms of their leave or fail to return to prison.

Serious violence is also rare in Danish prisons. There were only three suicides and five other deaths throughout the Danish prison system in 2013, as compared to 4,446 deaths in U.S. jail and state prison facilities that same year. (These numbers also speak to the disparate scales of the prison systems; in both countries fewer than 1 percent of the prison population dies each year).

Our research suggests that prison staff do indeed feel safe in these environments, as imperfect as they are. Recidivism is also relatively low among released Danish prisoners, hovering around 27 percent, half of the average recidivism rates reported across various U.S. jurisdictions. In spite of low violence and low recidivism rates, the Danish prison system grapples with both ethnic inequities and human rights abuses. About 40 percent of prisoners in Denmark are not ethnically Danish; this is almost four times the percentage of non-Danes in the general population. And Danish prisons, much like U.S. prisons, have faced criticism for being too quick to put prisoners in solitary confinement for extended periods of time.

Still, the value of Denmark’s example to a reform-minded public lies not in replicating its particular strategies or techniques but in adopting its broader ethos — one that grants prisoners dignity and allows room for error.

This is a lesson that the United States needs to learn. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, yet we have little to show for either the money invested or the lives lost to this system. U.S. prisoners wear anonymous facility garb, eat mass produced food in assembly cafeteria lines, and spend hours on end in tiny, bleak cement cells. As President Obama noted this past week, as many as 100,000 prisoners across the United States are housed in solitary confinement. Hundreds of these prisoners are released directly to the streets every year, often with dangerous consequences: two went on shooting rampages upon release in 2013.

Officials say a zero tolerance policy is the only way to ensure safety in a facility full of felons. But in reality, such policies do little. Prisoners use drugs, escape and recidivate. In spite of invasive search routines for prisoners and visitors alike, prisons across the United States report problems with contraband from drugs to cellphones to prison-made knives.

Even though U.S. prisoners are not permitted to have knives or prepare their own food for safety reasons, in 2011 the Supreme Court found that one California prisoner died unnecessarily every week — lives lost not to violence, but to medical negligence. And when a prisoner escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in New York in June 2015, more than 60 prisoners complained of a backlash of abusive beatings. Danish prison officials say that their prisoners act out less because they are treated humanely; they, too, are allowed to make mistakes.

Remedying contraband problems, health-care failures, violence and abusive practices will require more than a value shift toward rehabilitation, normalization or dignity. To roll back mass incarceration and humanize our prisons, as a nation we’re also going to have to start getting comfortable with failure.”

Conclusions

Both pros and cons taken into consideration, I think the Danish prison system has admirable features and is something worth thinking about further. There is no chance that this system could be fully implemented into America because the American view towards prisons is very hardcore and based upon principles of punishment, dehumanization, and lack of trust compared to Denmark’s reformation, maintenance of dignity, and trust. Nevertheless, I think America could take a few tricks and tips from this system – especially given our prison statistics about and questionable history. In the end, if we can reduce the amount of criminals in the country after the crime is committed and after they serve their sentence, who cares if it’s done a little differently than we’re used to?