In her Ted talk about ADX Florence, a supermax prison outside of Denver, Colorado, Laura Rovner talks about the effects that solitary confinement has on people. Like her, I believe that the people in the prison, no matter what they have done, should be treated better.
People might argue that this is the only way to keep prisoners contained, but it’s not. There’s a maximum security prison in Norway called Halden Prison, and it has none of those features. Every prison cell is 10 square metres(110 square feet), and has a television, desk, and fridge. In the common area, there is a kitchen where inmates can cook their own food, and a living room with a video game console. Inmates are locked inside their rooms for twelve hours a day, but they are encouraged[read:paid with 53 korner($9)]to leave their rooms the other twelve hours. The prison offers woodworking, cooking, and music classes to the inmates. The prison also has a library and a gym with everything you’ll normally expect at a normal library and prison. The guards in the prison are also normally unarmed and are encouraged to spend time with the inmates. This is called dynamic security, where the government tries to prevent bad intentions, rather than bad behaviour, and it works. The recidivism rate, the rate in which someone will commit the same crime again, is 50% times lower than traditional prisons once the inmates are released. It also saves Norwegian law enforcement and the Norwegian government more money because there is a lower crime rate and less people reliant on government aid programs.
Prisons are places where people are supposed to be re-educated and corrected from their past acts, and it has been proven that dynamic security prisons work. We’ve already taken away inmates freedoms by locking them up in jail, we don’t need to take away their will to live as well.
