Why is the U.S. reluctant to adopt the Scandinavian prison model?

A handful of states from California, Pennsylvania to Maine have tried to adopt a more rehabilitative Scandinavian prison model. But such models have failed to be replicated at large scale. Why?

Jordan Hyatt, professor of criminology and justice studies at Drexel University. He’s the co-principal investigator of the Scandinavian Prison Project, which in 2022 opened a unit known as “Little Scandinavia” at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) Chester outside Philadelphia.

Randall Liberty, Maine Commissioner of the Department of Corrections. He was appointed in 2019. Prior to that, he served as the Warden of the Maine State Prison and worked for 26 years at the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office, nine as the elected sheriff.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. Co-author of the 2026 report: Prison Reform in the United States. For the report, the group visited over 20 prisons in 10 states, some multiple times.

Jay Lawrie, former corrections officer with 20 years’ experience. Chairs the criminal justice programs at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.

Charles Diorio, an incarcerated person in Massachusetts. He runs the website “Inmate Author Project.”

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

DEBORAH BECKER:  For the past several years, I've gotten regular phone calls from a Massachusetts prisoner. The calls always start with a warning.

This call is not private. It'll be recorded and may be monitored.

BECKER: The calls are from Charles Diorio, who's been incarcerated for about a third of his 64 years on the planet.

CHARLES DIORIO: Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

BECKER: Charles typically calls to talk about prison life and his website, Inmate Author Project, where he often writes about the conditions inside the maximum security prison where he is being held.

DIORIO: It's very violent. Lockdowns are routine. Inmates are locked in cells for 24, 48 hours.

Essential privileges are restricted, rights are ignored. Prisoners live in a perpetual misery.

BECKER: He recently spent about three weeks in a special behavioral unit after he was accused falsely, he says, of threatening staff.

DIORIO: I was placed in a cell where there was recently a fire. I was forced to clean the soot from the fire.

I was not provided gloves. They use it as a punishment cell. The sprinkler system which went off during the fire wasn't fixed. Water was leaking and dripping onto the floor. Prisoners yell and scream in crisis. It is filthy. It is never cleaned. It is never sanitized.

BECKER: Charles has been incarcerated in three different states over the years and says the prison system has changed with many facilities now serving as defacto mental health institutions.

DIORIO: That is really the major problem right now, that you have inmates that have open mental health, that have significant drug addictions.

BECKER: Soon, Charles will be eligible for parole. He doesn't know what he's going to do once he's out.

DIORIO: I have no place to go. I have no way to go anywhere. We're provided no real meaningful way to get our lives together.

BECKER: That was Charles Diorio, who's incarcerated in Massachusetts. We did reach out to the Massachusetts Department of Correction for comment about Charles' allegations. But they did not respond to those by our broadcast deadline. However, descriptions of prison life like those from Charles are not uncommon.

Some say prison's supposed to be harsh. Others say we have to find a better way, and Scandinavia might be part of that. Scandinavian countries have become known for their incarceration model, which is based more on rehabilitation than retribution. Several U.S. prisons are trying to replicate this, and we're going to talk with officials from some of those facilities this hour to see how it's working.

Joining us first is Jordan Hyatt. He's co-principal investigator of the Scandinavian Prison Project, which in 2022 opened a unit known as Little Scandinavia at the State Correctional Institution in Chester, outside Philadelphia. Hyatt is also a professor of criminology and justice studies at Drexel University.

He joins us from Philadelphia. Professor, welcome to On Point.

JORDAN HYATT: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

BECKER: So can you describe a little Scandinavia for us?

HYATT: Sure. So Little Scandinavia is a single unit at SCI Chester, which as you said is located just outside of Philadelphia, where the staff at the institution have tried to rethink kind of the fundamentals of corrections, both in terms of the built environment and the policies that govern the daily lives, the people who live and work there.

And those decisions were made not based on current precedent here in the United States, but rather on their experiences having spent time abroad, particularly working in prisons in Norway and in Sweden over the past few years.

BECKER: And so what are some of the main ideas that they brought back with them to implement at Little Scandinavia in Pennsylvania?

HYATT: So the most obvious changes, and the ones that perhaps are least important are the ways they've reconstructed the housing unit itself. Every man on that unit has their own cell with their refrigerator, and they've changed the furniture to be a little bit more humane, a little bit more like you would see in home or an offic iIn the community, there's a full kitchen. They order their groceries from the community. And that has become one of the key kind of pillars. There are plants throughout and they've made a bunch of other environmental changes, but I think the more fundamental difference is the way that the staff are trained, and the way the staff interact with the residents on the unit, following an adapted model of what they call contact officer in Scandinavia.

BECKER: Okay. Can you explain it?

HYATT: Sure. So it takes them away from being exclusively focused on safety and security. And while that is still very important in paramount, they also are responsible for understanding the needs of the people who are incarcerated and meeting them where they are, spending time talking with them, understanding their challenges, and facilitating the development of a very different kind of community on that single housing unit.

BECKER: And you said training as well. So what kind of training does that entail to have officers be able to do this and change from the model that they had been working under previously?

HYATT: Sure. So the first thing was to show them what that model was really like. And so we've had the opportunity to bring groups of correctional officers and leaders from Pennsylvania to Norway and to Sweden over the past few years so they could see firsthand exactly what the scan Scandinavian model looks like in practice.

And then they were charged with thinking about the adaptation process. How could what they saw abroad be changed to work in the unique context in a Pennsylvania prison? And that was the starting point for their journey. And now it leverages both ongoing trainings in Scandinavia. But also repurposing the kinds of opportunities that the correctional services here in Pennsylvania offer, but concentrating that expertise and that knowledge on a single housing unit.

Again, empowering these staff to take ownership over a space that they don't always have. And when you say single unit, what does that mean in terms of number of people and how they're selected? Are these only very low risk folks who are allowed to go into this special unit? Or how do you choose.

HYATT: So first the size of the unit, it's, there are 64 cells. Each person has their own cells. So there are 64 residents on this unit. It's one of 14 housing units in the facility, which holds about 1,100 people in total. But this isn't an honor block and it's not a privilege that people can earn, rather the incarcerated men are able to join the unit through a lottery process.

So everybody in the general population has an equal chance of being selected to move to the unit. And because this is also a research project, it gives us the ability to really understand the impact on moving to this different kind of a community on things like safety, security, wellbeing.

Amongst the incarcerated population, and also in a slightly different way, understanding how it impacts staff wellbeing, which is incredibly important in the challenging correctional environment that these people are working in.

BECKER: So you started this four years ago. What do you have in terms of results?

Is it actually giving you improved outcomes with the folks who are in custody? And is your staff feeling better about what's going on?

HYATT: So we have a really great team of qualitative researchers who speak with everybody across the institution. And from a staff perspective, we hear much more positive responses with regard to their job satisfaction, their wellbeing, both mentally and physically, and the desirability of their job itself.

And then when we talk with the incarcerated population, we see very similar kinds of responses and a higher-level engagement both within the community on the unit and within the prison more broadly. People have a very different view about things like procedural justice and fairness on this unit as compared to the rest of the institution.

And we look at things like violence and misconduct on the unit, and though the data are still preliminary, they're trending in a very positive direction. So we're seeing fewer incidents of disorder, a near absence of violence, less use of isolation, the kinds of measures that would suggest that this is a kind of beneficial community, both for the people who live there and the operation of the prison as a whole.

Were there things that you saw or learned about in the Scandinavian prison model that you said, that just is not going to work here? We can't do that.

HYATT: Fortunately, it wasn't our decision to make. We were there to guide the staff and the leaders through that process, and I think there was a lot that they saw abroad that just wouldn't work in the United States or in these kinds of facilities.

Things like work furloughs or auto shops, things that are just really interesting in a Scandinavian context. But there's no precedent here in the U.S. But what they did a really good job of implementing was an adaptation model. And I think the grocery program is the neatest example. And so while they were abroad, both in Sweden and in Norway, they saw many institutions where there was a small grocery store with fresh fruits and vegetables, things that the incarcerated population could purchase and use to cook their own meals.

That was a great starting place for the conversation, but for many reasons, both economical and practical, that just wasn't possible. But what the staff did was they developed almost an Instacart for prison, where every other week, one of the residents sits down with our contact officer and they place an order to low local grocery store, and they bring those groceries to the institution.

They're processed through security, and then they're delivered to the unit, allowing them to cook and use the kitchen, in ways that they don't normally have access to with fresh fruits and vegetables, things from their own cultural, tradition, things like that. And of course there are restrictions on glass and medicine and things like that because security does matter, but it really has become a tent pole for the community there.

BECKER: Is it more expensive?

HYATT: The grocery program?

BECKER: No not the grocery program. Just overall is the overall program more expensive? Because I would imagine that would be, what some folks would say is that it costs already too much for prisons and incarceration, and this is only going to increase those costs.

What would you say?

HYATT: I think that is true. The biggest drivers of cost and as in many cases is people. So there are more staff on this unit. Traditionally, a unit of this structure would have one officer and about 128 or 126 incarcerated people. They've changed that ratio to maybe two or three staff at any given time and 64 incarcerated people.

So a dramatic shift, and that is ultimately the biggest driver of cost. The physical infrastructure changes which draw most people's attention are not the real kind of expensive part of these kinds of changes. But what we know is that in the grand scheme of things, given the size of correctional budgets and that this is just one unit of many, it hasn't made an appreciable impact on staffing levels and budgets for this prison.

And there's a, I think, a very fair argument about how we invest both in people and in conditions of confinement to improve the daily life for those who live and work in prison.

BECKER: In just a couple of seconds before we have to go to a break, what do you say to folks who say, why make this any more comfortable for people who have committed crimes?

It's not supposed to be a vacation. What do you say?

HYATT: It's still prison. And if you talk to people who are incarcerated, they will tell you the same thing. Losing their liberty, losing their freedom is truly the punishment. But people in prison, both who live there and who work there deserve a safe environment.

They deserve the basics of human dignity, and this is a way to bring both of those communities together in a way that seems to be mutually beneficial and moving kind of policy in a more positive direction.

Part II

BECKER: Today we're talking about prisons in the U.S. and the Scandinavian prison model. Correctional facilities in some states are experimenting with adaptations of the Scandinavian model to see if it might help improve safety inside the walls, reduce recidivism, and boost historically low correctional staffing.

Take the state of Maine. For example, in 2022, the Maine Department of Corrections started a new approach to focus on, quote, rehabilitation, mutual respect, human dignity, and community reintegration. End quote. Joining us now is Maine's Commissioner of Corrections, Randall Liberty. Welcome, Commissioner Liberty to On Point.

RANDALL LIBERTY: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

BECKER: So I wanna talk about first how your philosophy as commissioner was formed, which I would imagine is in part because your father was incarcerated in Maine when you were a child. What did you see? What do you remember from that time and how your dad was treated when he was incarcerated?

LIBERTY: Yeah, so the first time I visited the Maine State Prison was in 1971 to visit my father at the old Thomaston State Prison. And I was seven years old and I returned to the prison 40 years later as the warden. And he was incarcerated off and on throughout my childhood. And it was very early on in the seventies and eighties, it was very Shawshank it was that sort of a typical correctional environment.

BECKER: Did the things that you saw when you visited your dad, did that experience all contribute to you going into corrections and being where you are today?

LIBERTY: Yeah, I think so. My brothers and I all joined the army and we're military policemen. And I came off active duty and I worked in law enforcement for a long time.

I worked in the local county jail and eventually I was the elected sheriff where I managed the jail for 14 years and my time on the street, my time in the local correctional setting and later as warden, now commissioner, have really formed the opinion that our job as law enforcement and correctional professionals is to release people healthier than when they arrived in our setting.

And we know that people arrive because they have mental health issues, substance use disorder, trauma backgrounds, poverty, neglect, and our job really is to address those issues and release people that are healthier. And how do you do that? Now we do it by ensuring that we have universal medication for substance use disorder.

So everybody receives treatment that has received the diagnosis here at the main Department of Corrections. We provide a therapeutic and a redemptive environment where it's a non adversarial approach. Where the staff and the residents work in collaboration to address those issues. And I'm confident that we release people that are in much better shape than they are, we have returned to custody rates in the low twenties, 21%.

And if you attend the University of Maine in Augusta here in Maine, you have a 0.05% return to custody rate. So it works.

BECKER: So you mean if someone incarcerated is taking courses at the University of Maine at Augusta and they perhaps complete a degree program or another program at the university, the rate goes way down in terms of them being returned to incarceration.

LIBERTY: Significantly. We have 170 students right now that are full-time. We have another 40 that are part-time. I have 12 graduate students, four PhD candidates. And the money that's invested through Second Chance Pell Grants and other grants is the best money I've ever seen invested for our corrections and public safety.

BECKER: Let's talk money because we did speak with Jordan Hyatt in Pennsylvania, which has a little Scandinavian project going on right now to try to also implement a similar philosophy that you are in correctional facilities in Pennsylvania, but he said it's more expensive. Is it more expensive for you in Maine?

LIBERTY: I find just the opposite. We have a earned living unit which is the unit that is really self-governed. We have an officer that rolls in and does count. On occasion in the facility as is typically described in some of these units, we have a full kitchen. We have a acre and a half of organic garden that they go out into the no man's land and they're able to tend, they are raising their own food and consuming it on the unit.

We have service dogs that they're raising and that really creates a normative environment there. So as far as cost, there's no additional cost. In fact, we've had great success because we've been able to reduce staffing in that unit and other honor units in our facilities. We have four earned living units and we have eight honor pods in our system.

And though we're able to reduce staffing and so we save money that way.

BECKER: And staff, were they welcoming of this?

LIBERTY: As you can imagine, corrections is pretty entrenched in tradition and culture and has taken us a while to get there. But I think that as we continue to evolve corrections in a more meaningful way, in a more effective way, we have to realize that we have to bring along the staff, along with the residents as we do our work.

And so it means professional growth. It means providing vision, it means providing clarity that this both benefits not only the residents in our care, but also the staff with reduced violence. In 2017, I had 87 assaults on staff at the Maine State Prison, and four years later, that was down to seven assaults on staff.

So creating a safer work environment. Resulting in better retention rates and much easier recruiting rates.

BECKER: would seem that it's a real culture shift though, right? It would seem that there's a huge culture shift going on and it's really part of our fundamental thinking about incarceration, that it's supposed to be difficult, it's supposed to be harsh.

And there are some skeptics who've been quite loud in their skepticism. Among them is William Young who spent more than two decades working in corrections in Nebraska. Young hosts a podcast called Just Corrections with William Young. Last year, he published an episode titled Why the Norway Prison Model Won't Work in the U.S.

Here's a little bit of what he said on the podcast.

WILLIAM YOUNG: Look, there's no denying the appeal of the Norwegian prison model, but the truth is, comparing Norway's prison system to ours is like comparing apples to something that has nothing to do with apples, right? Their system is designed for a smaller, more cohesive society with a vastly different culture, political and social dynamic.

BECKER: The biggest hurdle Young has said is how each country views prisons.

Norway's approach to incarceration. It works, because it reflects the value of their society. There's widespread support for rehabilitation, at least what I've heard, over punishment. Communities believe in second chances and are willing to invest money in programs that help incarcerated individuals successfully reintegrate into society.

But here in the U.S., it's a different mindset. Our cultural mindset is different. Our approach to incarceration is rooted in retribution, right? Many communities view rehabilitation effort as being soft, so without a cultural shift, what I feel is the foundation for the Norway model simply doesn't exist.

BECKER: Another issue he says is staffing. The U.S. is experiencing a correctional staffing shortage right now, and workers in Norway's prisons have different training.

Their staff are highly trained in communication, deescalation, and rehabilitation. And the training in Norway to be a CEO is two years. Two years, and you walk away with a degree. Here in the U.S., we get four to six weeks. Here, staff are overworked, they're underpaid, they're undervalued, and that's because legislators and leadership haven't prioritized the kind of investment in staff training and wellbeing that the Norway prison model, the Norwegian model requires. And if we can't invest in our staff, how could we expect them to carry out a system that demands such a higher level of emotional intelligence and engagement?

BECKER: That was William Young, a corrections worker in Nebraska. And I'm wondering, Commissioner Liberty from Augusta, Maine, what you would say to some of his comments about how changing the prison system is difficult and training staff is an issue. And when we have a staffing shortage and really there's just a completely different mindset, what do you say?

LIBERTY: I say that it is possible. We're doing it in Maine. We're doing it well. I've been in the industry for 44 years. I've seen the change, the evolution over time. The reason that we have a staffing problem in America is because we have an environment that is often violent. It's often difficult environment to work in.

And if we're able to shift the culture and the environment to where it's a safe place to work, it's a place where people truly feel like they're making a difference in the community and they're truly releasing people that are safer. To release into the community. It truly works and I spend a fair amount of my time in the legislature and the Criminal Justice Public Safety Committee in Maine is made up of several retired law enforcement and several people that are far left.

And we navigate this and I explain to them, our duty as correctional leaders to explain to the committees and to the public that the fact that our job is to release people that are healthier than when they arrived. That's how we make our community safer. And one example of that is we do remote work here and I've had 45 of my residents working from inside the prison system at a maximum-security prison doing outside jobs via the internet.

And some of them are making $60, $70, $80,000. And people say, where's the punishment in that? What I say to them is, this allows individuals to pay their mortgage, to pay their child support, to pay tuition for their children, to pay victims of crime. Restitution, they pay state and federal tax, and they also pay room and board here.

That gives them the opportunity to be responsible, gives them the opportunity to feel like an adult and care for their families. And it softens and quiets the facilities. And this is really a holistic approach where you bring in training service dogs, where you bring in organic gardening. For me to establish an organic garden here at the Maine State Prison, I literally went out to the community and said, do you have any post retail seedlings that I can get for a deal?

And they donated 3,000 pepper plants, 3,000 tomato plants. And those individuals were able to raise, I brought in the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, I certified 120 residents as master gardeners. They're therapeutically raising gardens inside the facilities, harvesting it in the morning, eating an endless salad bar at noon.

Just the whole, it's a holistic approach where the correctional office, when he's first hired, we tell them your job is to navigate coach and mentor and model pro-social behavior. That's what your job is. And they understand that. The more entrenched staff has required additional work and we've been doing that work and who we are seven or eight years later, continually trying to evolve the process. We've had a significant reduction in violence. Our staffing levels are good. We have good retention rates and the violence has significantly been reduced.

BECKER: So do you have hard data? You're still collecting that in terms of the safety within the facility?

LIBERTY: Yeah, we have hard data. We also have a partner with the Brennan Center out of New York. And they're collecting data also. But I also have our own internal data as a results to assaults on staff, resident on resident, retention rates, all of that. It all makes good sense and it works very well here.

BECKER: And so give me an example of say maybe one piece of data just so we can get it in our heads of how dramatic this might be in terms of a change for Maine.

LIBERTY: Sure. So we're talking about staffing, that's the major problem for correctional leaders nationally. I have in several of my facilities; I have a 14% vacancy rate for the Maine State Prison. Other facilities, 8%, 6%, 9%. Those vacancy rates nationally are 40% very frequently. And then that creates the situation where someone working six in the evening to six in the morning, their relief doesn't come because they're short staffed and they have to work another four hours.

And it creates this very cranky, ugly officer that's having troubles at home and that's when people quit and you can't get people to come in and people are locked into the facilities, into their cells for long periods of time and the temperature goes up. It's all a holistic approach.

It isn't one unit; it isn't just one earned living unit. It's not one honor pod. It's a holistic approach where it's non adversarial working in collaboration to release healthy people back into the community. When you ever turn to custody rates of. 50, 55%. What's the return on the investment for the taxpayer?

The taxpayers are expecting people to be released, treated, having vocational training, having an education, whether it be a high set or a college degree and having the ability to have a livable wage in their release. If not, they're coming back and there's no money saved there.

BECKER: And that's what you would probably say to folks who say that holistic approach is too soft on crime and you need to be tough.

LIBERTY: If you care about the community being safe, if you care about individuals being redeemed, because I believe in redemption. If you want your neighbor to be a healthy individual and is released from a prison setting, you provide substance use disorder programming.

You provide vocational programming, you provide an environment that's therapeutic and redemptive and they release, and that's how you make our community safer and stronger.

BECKER: Randall Liberty, Maine commissioner of the Department of Corrections, thanks so much for being with us.

LIBERTY: Thank you.

BECKER: The commissioner mentioned the Brennan Center, and I wanna bring another voice into the conversation right now.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who's senior Director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program. Lauren-Brooke, thanks for being with us.

LAUREN-BROOKE EISEN: A pleasure to be here today.

BECKER: So I'm wondering if you could just respond to a little bit of what the commissioner said about how the approach in Maine appears to be working right now and what the Brennan Center is doing in conjunction with Maine.

EISEN: There is a quiet revolution in corrections taking place all over the country that's focused on improving prison conditions for staff and incarcerated people, and reducing violence in these places, which as Commissioner Liberty just mentioned, will ultimately benefit public safety in our communities.

And this revolution is happening in a geographically and politically diverse set of states. We just released a report a couple of weeks ago highlighting the work of so many jurisdictions across the country. The team at the Brennan Center visited over 20 prisons in 10 states, some prisons multiple times.

As Commissioner Liberty mentioned, we have a partnership with Maine where we are conducting surveys of incarcerated residents and staff about the important culture change that's taking place there. And our report includes these green shoots of possibility for how correctional leaders across the country, staff, advocates, and nonprofits are rolling up their sleeves to improve conditions of confinement that ultimately can reduce violence in prison and enhance rehabilitation.

BECKER: But we heard that there are a lot of skeptics to this overall approach, to this more holistic approach, perhaps Scandinavian prison method, if you want to call it that. And we heard from a correction officer as a podcast about this who said, it's a different mindset in this country.

We look at corrections differently. We look at incarceration differently. They also said that we don't have the staff trained to take on this kind of approach and perhaps do some of the things that you are suggesting here. In the minute before we have to take a break. Lauren-Brooke, what would you say about some of those questions?

EISEN: There are significant challenges in making reforms. There are severe staffing shortages. Though many leaders like Commissioner Liberty report that reforms actually improve recruitment and retention and the effect of the nationwide correctional staffing shortage is undeniable, impacting day-to-day operations and the implementation of new initiatives.

When prisons are understaffed, frontline personnel struggle to find time or energy for additional trainings or changes. No matter how positive, but what we're finding is that as Commissioner Liberty mentioned, you can create an earned living unit where you have one officer you count, where you have fewer staff actually supervising certain units.

And we have found across the country, despite this nationwide staffing shortage, dozens of states are rolling up their sleeves and saying, we're not going to wait until we have enough staff. We're going to make reform now because we have to improve conditions in our facilities.

Part III

BECKER: I want to turn to Connecticut for a discussion about this, specifically to Jay Lawrie, who chairs the criminal justice programs at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a corrections officer in Connecticut for two decades and a few years ago, Professor Lawrie was tapped to help the Department of Corrections apply a more rehabilitative approach, similar to the Scandinavian model.

He says the reaction wasn't good when the proposal was first presented to staff at the Garner Correctional Institution back in 2024.

JAY LAWRIE: And we had about 35 or 40 staff from Garner, and none of them wanted anything to do with this. They didn't, I joke that for 20 years I feared walking into a facility and being assaulted by an inmate.

That was the first time I thought I was goanna be assaulted by staff. They were, they just did not want to hear anything we had to say.

BECKER: But Professor Lawrie says, officers warmed up after hearing that they would be helping design some of the changes.

LAWRIE: The one thing that separates this approach from anything else I've ever experienced in corrections; it is driven by the line officer.

The frontline CEO, the individual working the block, the individual on the floor. In all of my years of experience, whenever there's been a new policy or procedure, you walk into roll call in the morning, lieutenant starts reading the announcements. They talk about we're gonna start, we're gonna run this new pilot program.

Someone from Central Office created it, staff knew that person hasn't been in a facility in 10 years, and that really turned staff off. This was all driven by staff. These staff own this program.

BECKER: The staff plans included a special team that focused on increasing trust and building relationships with the highest risk prisoners, they started asking incarcerated people about their families. They started playing cards with them, helping fill out job applications or writing letters to estranged relatives. These changes, he says, were dramatic.

LAWRIE: Since they've been working over that last year, disciplinary reports for the individuals they've been working with have decreased 85%, which is incredible.

One of the individuals that they had was this, was a gentleman who was constantly, who was always self-harming. He was always going to outside hospital. I think he'd been to outside hospital 15 times in the three months prior to his beginning this program. Since he's been in the program into the report date for that one year, not one trip to outside hospital.

BECKER: As for the effects on the staff, Jay says they've reported better relationships with coworkers, family members. They report less stress and improved mental health.

LAWRIE: To me, that's phenomenal. To be quite honest I'm jealous. I spent 20 years working the system. No one once ever asked me my opinion and cared about my response.

So if we can empower staff, if we can train them properly, rely on them to use their judgment, if we can do that, I think we will be able to attract a type of individual into the career that may not have considered corrections in the past. People wanna feel rewarded, they wanna be able to practice autonomy, they wanna be respected and appreciated.

None of those were things I ever experienced in my career.

BECKER: That was Jay Lawrie, a former Connecticut correction officer, and now chair of the Criminal Justice Programs at Alberta Magnus College and Lauren-Brooke Eisen is with us from the Brennan Center. And Lauren-Brooke, what I'm wondering is, you heard about, especially about the initial staff challenges that Jay Lawrie said he faced when talking about perhaps changing to a more holistic approach in the prisons.

Is that common and is it recommended that if the approach is going to change, staff members must be more directly involved and given some autonomy and authority to implement some of these changes?

EISEN: Absolutely, frontline buy-in from staff recognizing that real change happens inside facilities is key.

What we saw is that some shared governance models such as resident advisory councils, staff resident innovation teams where staff and incarcerated individuals co-lead on making these changes and providing recommendations. One organization that we highlighted in this report is amend based at the UC SF School of Medicine.

They draw on international correctional models and public health practices to reduce harm and promote the health and humanity of prison staff and those who are incarcerated. And one of their key levers of success is that they understand that you need to bring in correctional staff and you need to support the staff and recognize that many initiatives fail because there are few resources and support for the correctional staff who are the frontline officers implementing a lot of these reforms.

Culture change is really hard. It's hard work. It takes time. The traditional punitive model of supervision is really tough to overcome because the training that staff traditionally receive in the U.S. has been designed to perpetuate this approach. Truly, it's this us versus them command and control model, and moving away from that model, highlighting reforms that prioritize human interactions, that enable staff to have a better sense of resident's needs. Allowing them to anticipate and prevent security risks rather than responding after an incident has occurred is key.

And these are a lot of the principles that we saw implemented across the country in a very diverse geographically set of states from North Dakota to Michigan to South Carolina, to Connecticut, to Maine to Pennsylvania.

BECKER: Yeah. We've touched on just a few this hour, Pennsylvania and Maine. But I wonder, would you describe this as taking hold or is there a great deal of reluctance? And is the reluctance largely due to some of the things you just mentioned?

The culture and the belief in what incarceration is expected to accomplish.

EISEN: So there are often people in communities who argue you shouldn't waste money on those who are being punished. And it's true that tracking the monetary cost versus the benefit of relatively novel programs and initiatives such as the ones described in our report can be tricky.

It's easy to see upfront spending on new facilities or program managers as expensive, but truly less visible are the reduced cost of incarceration and recidivism. Another major challenge to reform is this entrenched belief, regardless of cost, that people in prison do not deserve humane conditions.

And that prison is meant to be harsh, onerous, punitive. These beliefs are sometimes held by lawmakers, members of the public, many correctional officers. But we've started to see a transformation across the country in how correctional officers and governors and policy makers think about prisons.

And truly we started to see political shifts in this thinking. For years, our justice system has largely failed those who are incarcerated and are often inhumane prisons and jails. It's failed their families who see their loved ones return to their communities without housing, without jobs, without access to basic civil rights like voting.

And it's for the most part, failed those who work in our jails and our prisons, who often suffer these untenable working conditions and may experience violence and trauma themselves. These broken systems harm everyone. And we've started to see that incarcerated individuals, correctional officials, the families of all of the above, realize that they have a shared interest in improving conditions of confinement, and our research demonstrates that many of these reforms absolutely reduce violence in prisons, increase correction, staff satisfaction and retention, and ultimately improve post-release outcomes contributing to better public safety.

BECKER: I just wonder though, what you might say to some of the concerns we heard earlier in the hours. Especially from correction officer William Young. Things like, and I know you've mentioned this and I know it's a difficult thing to get over a mindset, a culture, a punitive mindset. But he also said the Scandinavian countries have much more social supports for people as well.

So it's a complex web of things that could be real challenges to trying to implement this here in the United States. How do you go about addressing that?

EISEN: So replicating and scaling these programs is hard. Taking a step back, there are hundreds of prisons across the country within 50 states, and each prison, let alone an entire state system, has its own culture.

If you want to drill down even more, each shift within each prison has its own culture, depending on the officers who are on that shift. So when you think about replication and scale, you have to remember the significant challenges that these changes are up against. You can't cut and paste a unit or a culture change from one prison to another.

It's really about translating a set of principles into very different contexts across different prison environments. For example, what works in a prison in Connecticut may be different from what works in a facility in South Carolina. And for many of the initiatives featured in our report, reforms do depend on outside partners who drive planning, training, implementation, provide research capacity, and offer other resources and support to continue and expand these projects.

And we need to have additional conversations about who's going to continue to fund this type of work, this culture change, this transformation of prisons, whether it's a unit or an entire prison system, and we are not Scandinavia, but what this report has made clear is that prison reform is possible in the United States.

It works, it is happening across the country and it's not about being lenient, it's about investing in approaches that reduce harm, improve safety, and deliver better outcomes for staff, family, and communities.

BECKER: And why is it clear to you that it works? What data points stand out to you from your research?

You've looked in 10 different states about how this is happening. I'm wondering what stands out to you to say, we know this is effective because this is what we looked at and this is the data we got or the impression we got. So the Vera Institute's Restoring Promise Initiative, redesigns prison programming and housing for young adults 18 to 25.

It allows them more autonomy, allows them mentors, more programming and people in the South Carolina restoring promise unit had 83% lower odds of ending up in restrictive housing and 73% lower odds of being written up for violence. The Last Mile, another one of our partners, an organization we wrote about, partners with corrections agencies across the country to provide tech and vocational training in prisons.

More than 70% of its alumni secure jobs within six months of release. You heard from Randall Liberty, the commissioner of the Maine Department of Correction. They had 36% drop in assaults on staff, and 40% drop in reported assaults between residents after they started to change their entire prison system.

Amend, the group I mentioned earlier, based at the UCSF School of Medicine. When it worked in one behavioral health unit in Oregon, what they did is they introduced what's called a resource team, which is a group of specially trained staff working with high needs people who engage in high-risk behavior. In this one unit, their work alone resulted in a 74% decrease in assaults.

We also highlighted the work that's happening in Michigan, director Heidi Washington started something called Vocational Village. It was started in one prison and then expanded to multiple prisons across the state, and they focus on job training, skill building, and the graduates from Michigan's vocational village in 2019 had a lower recidivism rate compared to all people released from Michigan facilities.

In fact, it was 5% lower than the recidivism rate of individuals not in a vocational village program. So this is hard data and this shows that all of these reforms are significantly reducing violence, improving post-release outcomes. And we've spoken to correctional leaders, correctional staff across the country.

We engaged over 70 people working, living in prisons as we did this research. And we found that many of the correctional officers who are working in these jurisdictions, partnering with nonprofits, focused on these changes are reporting that they are happier, that they finally feel that their jobs have a purpose, that they are supporting others. They are introducing humanity and human dignity into a system that for  most of its existence, the prison system in the U.S. has been completely devoid of this humanity.

BECKER: We spoke with a man incarcerated in Massachusetts at the top of the hour.

He doesn't think that a more holistic model really would work. While he would certainly welcome that, he says that the prisons that he's been to, and he has been to multiple prisons in three different states, he feels that there is a lot of gang activity. People have grown up with a lot of violence.

And there're big institutions, right? Maybe it could work on a small scale or a special unit, but it can't really be replicated on a wider scale. I wonder what you would say to that.

EISEN: I would say that this report is proof of concept that prison reform in the United States is here.

It can be expanded and it is working. What we also saw is that a lot of correctional leaders are embracing the data, using both evidence and lived experience to show these reforms are working. Data can help reframe the debate away from these traditional narratives of being tough on crime, versus soft on crime, showing how these reforms enhance safety while saving money.

This work is critical and the stakes are so high. 450,000 people leave prison every year. Across the country, two thirds of those people are rearrested within three years, and nearly 60% are unemployed one year after release. We can't wait as a country to roll up our sleeves and start implementing this critical culture change on policy change to improve the conditions in our prisons for both staff and those who are incarcerated inside these facilities.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.