Larson contends that open prison punishments can be more effective than closed prison punishments in that they don't distract the prisoner from the misdeeds that brought them there, as harsh American prisons often do:
Imagine living on ... knowing every minute of every day, that this is
not your home, these people are not your family, your friends, your children, and you are always one misstep from a cell in a closed prison. You have strict curfews. In town you carry an electronic anklet. Yet nothing here feels unfair or unreasonable. You have, after all, committed a crime serious enough to make a range of other remedies untenable. Nothing you can see or touch or smell or taste, and no interaction with staff gives you anything to blame or resent about the system that brought you here.
Larson's depiction of open prisons as carving out space for purer reflection and remorse is fascinating — and undoubtedly alarming to supporters of the American model of incarceration.
Defenders of the highly punitive American prison would argue that the Nordic attitude toward prisons in general is naive in its assumption that prisoners can be treated as normal humans who can improve. Yet Nordic countries remain quite safe after allowing people who have committed the most severe crimes to spend time in them, generally for far shorter sentences than in the U.S.
It seems that there's a self-fulfilling dimension to the way a society chooses to imprison those that it deems criminal: If you tell someone they cannot get better, they won't; if you tell someone they can, they might just have a decent shot.
Most of this was taken from
Sweden's Remarkable Prison System Has Done What the U.S. Won't Even Consider
Amazing focusing on rehabilitation instead of brutality and retribution work.
