Using a
voice messaging app you have a class discussion on whether prisons should be
about punishment or rehabilitation. One of your classmates says that the prison
system should focus more on punishment and retribution since criminals deserve to be punished for their actions.
It is your turn to intervene and you think that
prisons should be more about rehabilitation. You read an article on the BBC
website entitled How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours. Select the relevant
information from the text and record your message defending your position.
Speak for 2 minutes.
Article:How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours
What is the point of sending someone
to prison - retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway
moved away from a punitive "lock-up" approach and sharply cut
reoffending rates. The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby went to see the system in
action, and to meet prison officers trained to serve as mentors and role
models for prisoners.
"OK, and now put your big toes together and
put your bum behind you!" calls the enthusiastic yoga instructor in
English to the 20 or so participants who are shuffling into child's pose
on rubber mats spread out on the grass in the faint early morning
sunshine.
"Can you feel the stretch?" she gently asks a heavily
tattooed man as she settles his ruffled T-shirt and smoothes his wide
back with her hand. "It's OK, yeah?"
It could be a yoga class at
any holistic health retreat anywhere in the world but the participants
here at Norway's maximum security Halden Prison are rather far removed
from the usual yummy mummy spa clientele. Barefoot murderers, rapists
and drug smugglers practise downward-facing dog and the lotus position
alongside their prison officers, each participant fully concentrating on
the clear instructions from the teacher.
"It calms them," says
prison governor Are Hoidal approvingly, as we watch from the sidelines.
"We don't want anger and violence in this place. We want calm and
peaceful inmates."
Tranquillity does not come cheaply. A place at Halden Prison costs
about £98,000 per year. The average annual cost of a prison place in
England in Wales is now about £40,000, or £59,000 in a Category A
prison.
A uniformed prison officer on a silver micro-scooter
greets us cheerily as he wheels past. Two prisoners jogging dutifully by
his side, keep pace.
Hoidal laughs at my nonplussed face.
"It's
called dynamic security!" he grins. "Guards and prisoners are together
in activities all the time. They eat together, play volleyball together,
do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact
with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them."
When Are Hoidal first began his career in the Norwegian Correctional
service in the early 1980s, the prison experience here was altogether
different.
"It was completely hard," he remembers. "It was a
masculine, macho culture with a focus on guarding and security. And the
recidivism rate was around 60-70%, like in the US."
But in the
early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a
rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms "revenge"
and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent
most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational
programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled.
"Not 'guards'," admonishes Hoidal gently, when I use the term. "We
are prison 'officers' and of course we make sure an inmate serves his
sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are
role models, coaches and mentors. And since our big reforms, recidivism
in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after
five years. So this works!"
In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.
The
architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents'
sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in
harmony with the surrounding nature - in fact the prison, which cost
£138m to build, has won several design awards for its minimalist chic.
Set in beautiful blueberry woods and peppered with majestic silver birch
and pine trees, the two-storey accommodation blocks and wooden
chalet-style buildings give the place an air of a trendy university
campus rather than a jail.
A thick, curving 24ft-high concrete wall snakes around the
circumference of the prison but there's no barbed wire or electric fence
in sight and you really have to look for the discreet security cameras.
There are movement detector sensors on each side of the wall, Hoidal
assures me - but no-one has ever tried to escape.
When I see the
inside of a cell - every inmate has his own cell, which comes with an en
suite toilet and shower room, a fridge, desk, flat TV screen and forest
views - and when I clock the immaculate sofas and well-equipped
kitchenette in the communal common room, I ask Halden's governor whether
the level of comfort here isn't a bit too cushy.
Are Hoidal nods politely. He's been expecting this question, of
course. It's one he answers every day, whether it comes from astounded
foreign journalists or from critics within Norway itself.
"It is not easy to have your freedom taken away," he insists.
"In
Norway, the punishment is just to take away someone's liberty. The
other rights stay. Prisoners can vote, they can have access to school,
to health care; they have the same rights as any Norwegian citizen.
Because inmates are human beings. They have done wrong, they must be
punished, but they are still human beings."
In the on-site garage, two inmates in overalls are tinkering with the
wheel arch of a car, brushing out mud and carefully re-fixing bolts.
Like most of the prisoners here, they leave their cells at 07:30 each
morning and are at work by 08:15. Apart from one hour's rest in their
cells during the afternoon, to coincide with the guards' break, they are
not locked in again until 20:30 at night.
The idea is to give
them a sense of normality and to help them focus on preparing for a new
life when they get out. Many inmates will be released from Halden as
fully qualified mechanics, carpenters and chefs.
"We start planning their release on the first day they arrive,"
explains Hoidal, as we walk through to the carpentry workshop where
several inmates are making wooden summer houses and benches to furnish a
new prison being built in the south of Norway.
"In Norway, all will be released - there are no life sentences," he reminds me.
"So we are releasing your neighbour," he continues. "If we treat
inmates like animals in prison, then we will release animals on to your
street."
(The maximum sentence in Norway is 21 years, but the law
does allow for preventative detention, which is the extension of a
sentence in five-year increments if the convicted person is deemed to be
a continued threat to society.)
In the graphic design studio,
quietly spoken Fredrik is putting the finishing touches to his striking
design for the front cover of the prison's cookery book. Sentenced to 15
years for murder, Fredrik says he has struggled to come to terms with
what he has done and the pain he has caused. Going on a silent
three-week retreat within the prison has helped him achieve peace, he
adds, and to reflect on his past.
He is not boasting when he tells me that he's achieved a diploma in
graphic design since he arrived at Halden, nor that he's passed eight
other exams at A and B grade and is now studying the Norwegian
equivalent of A-level maths and physics; he is just keen that I should
understand he is using his time inside wisely for a projected future
outside the curved wall.
"If you don't have opportunities and you
are just locked in a cage, you don't become a good citizen," Fredrik
says as he adjusts the colours on one of the photos on his screen. "Here
there are good opportunities, you can have a diploma and when you come
out, you can maybe get a stable job and that's important."
When I
congratulate Fredrik on his recent exam success he nods shyly and
confides that he hopes, once he's transferred to an open prison, to work
on getting a degree, a Masters, or even a doctorate.
Normalising
life behind bars (not that there are any bars on the windows at Halden)
is the key philosophy that underpins the Norwegian Correctional service.
At Halden, this means not only providing daily routines but ensuring
family contact is maintained too. Once every three months, inmates with
children can apply to a "Daddy In Prison" scheme which, if they pass the
necessary safeguarding tests, means they can spend a couple of nights
with their partner, sons and daughters in a cosy chalet within the
prison grounds.
"Lots of toys and children's books," points out
prison officer Linn Andreassen as she unlocks the gate and shows me the
little play garden. I note the double bed in the main bedroom, flanked
by a cot.
"Yeah, they get to play house, play happy families," she smiles. "It's a big privilege for them so they have to earn it."
Linn
is a slight young woman in her early 30s. She's been in the prison
service for 11 years already, 10 of which have been spent at Halden -
almost half of the staff at this category A prison are female. But Linn
assures me she has sounded the personal alarm that all Norwegian prison
officers carry only twice in her career, and insists she has never felt
sexually threatened.
"It's normal to have women in society," she
shrugs. "So the guys here need to cope with that. They need to respect
not just the uniform but the person, the woman as well. And we respect
them, so they respect us."
In the craft workshop, John, who is
serving a long sentence for drug smuggling, is stitching a black toy
sheep on his sewing machine. When I ask John what is good about the
Halden regime, the presence of female officers is one of the first
things he mentions.
"They're more effective to keep the macho guys
down," he reflects thoughtfully. "You have to think a bit differently
around them." He places an eye on to his sheep, ready to stitch.
"And when we play football, women are not such bad referees."
Another prisoner, Khan, is interested in our conversation and puts down the frog he's sewing.
"We are lucky to have women in the guard system," he agrees. "It normalises things."
It
takes 12 weeks in the UK to train a prison officer. In Norway it takes
two to three years. Eight kilometres north-east of Oslo in Lillestrom,
an impressive white and glass building houses the University College of
the Norwegian Correctional Service, where each year, 175 trainees,
selected from over 1,200 applicants, start their studies to become a
prison officer.
Hans-Jorgen Brucker walks me around the training
prison on campus, which is kitted out with reproduction cells and
prison-style furniture. I note a bulging pile of helmets and stab vests
in one storage room. Brucker acknowledges that prison officers will
undergo security and riot training, but he's fairly dismissive of this
part of the course.
"We want to stop reoffending which means officers need to be well
educated," he says. He shows me a paper outlining the rigorous selection
process, which involves written exams in Norwegian and English (about a
third of the prison population is non-native, so officers are expected
to be fluent in English) and physical fitness tests.
"My students
will study law, ethics, criminology, English, reintegration and social
work. Then they will have a year training in a prison and then they will
come back to take their final exams."
He winces when I ask him if he would employ a prison officer who had trained for only three months.
"I think there is a high risk for corruption with a short training,"
he says, clearly a little uncomfortable criticising the UK's system.
"In
our system, officers are quite well paid and when an officer knows more
about the law, he knows more about how to deal with inmates and how to
avoid violence."
Every year his students go to the UK to spend a
day observing an English prison and I ask him what his students say
about their experience in English high-security jails. He tells me they
are always surprised by the noise, the crowding and the relatively small
number of staff.
"It's an eye-opener," he says, clearing his throat politely.
The
only loud noise at Halden that I encounter comes from the TV in the
drug addiction unit's sitting room, where a rather spaced-out looking
inmate is watching a cops and robbers show. At one point my guide,
prison officer Linn Andreassen, disappears briefly to check something
with a colleague and I am left alone with the inmate. He grins at me,
points to the gun-wielding policemen on screen and makes a joke in
Norwegian before wandering off to his cell.
When I ask the prison governor, Are Hoidal, about the level of
violence in Halden prison, he looks genuinely surprised. I tell him that
in England and Wales, assaults on staff have almost tripled in five
years and that there were 10,213 assaults on staff in 2018, with 995 of
those classed as serious.
He scratches his head.
"Of course,
in some of our older prisons there is occasional violence but I really
don't remember the last time we had violence here," he reflects. "Maybe
we had one or two incidences of spitting?"
In the gardens at
Halden, 28-year-old trainee officer Jon Fredrik Andorsen is taking a
break from his duties with his experienced colleague, Linn. At Halden
there are 258 inmates (including 22 who are in a half-way house on the
other side of the wall) and 290 employees, 190 of whom are prison
officers. (The rest work as workshop tutors, teachers and admin staff.)
Jon Fredrik, who used to work as a car salesman, admits he would never
have considered joining the prison service if he hadn't felt his safety
was guaranteed. So far, he says, he has never felt threatened at Halden -
he has confidence in his training and in the wisdom of the more
experienced officers. Norwegian prison officers do not even carry pepper
sprays.
"My first defence is my voice and our social connection with the
inmates," he explains. "We defuse situations before they happen."
Linn
interjects: "You can't help others if you don't have good conditions
yourself. You need to have a clear head at all times in this job. To
focus. If you're going around scared you can't help anyone."
She
tells me how shocked she was, when visiting a prison in the UK, that
prison officers told her it was dangerous to stand in certain places
around the building as the inmates might throw things down on her. She
screws up her face.
"And there were so many prisoners! The UK locks up a lot more people than here in Norway, no?"
Scotland,
England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rates in Western
Europe. Scotland locks up 150 people per 100,000 of the population and
England and Wales almost 140 people, compared to Norway's 63.
The
smaller prison population means that at Halden prison, for instance,
each officer can be given three individual prisoners for whom he or she
will act as a point of contact. The contact officer helps fill out
applications, addresses complaints and makes sure that inmates get their
quota of phone calls home.
Kim, who is serving 17 years for murder, raises his eyebrows rather sarcastically when I mention this system.
"Some prisoners like to interact and some don't," he shrugs, closely watching Are Hoidal, who is in the room with us.
"I'm
sceptical about opening up to guards too much - if I open up will they
use it against me? It's a double-edged sword. Some guards are OK but…"
He trails off, still looking at Hoidal who is grinning good-naturedly
back at him.
As Hoidal and I walk back together towards his
office, past some colourful abstract paintings, he reminds me that the
practice of dynamic security at Halden is not always popular with
prisoners because the officers' omnipresence makes dealing drugs
difficult. There certainly is drug dealing at Halden, he admits, but
these are not drugs like heroin and spice that have been smuggled into
the prison from outside, they tend to be medications - opiates and
painkillers - that inmates have been prescribed by prison doctors.
Hoidal is extremely enthusiastic about the prison's new projects. A
choir has just started up - inmates already have their own on-site
recording studio, the aptly named Criminal Records - and he's hoping for
a Christmas concert to coincide with the release of the inmates' new
cookery book. But underneath his indefatigable positivity there is a
nagging worry; profits from oil production in the North Sea are
dwindling and the government has warned that swingeing cuts - including
to prison budgets - are on their way.
"If you want quality and
high-class results, we need money," argues Hoidal firmly. "I fear there
will be more violence and the recidivism rate will go up if we can't
have all the programmes we have now. It's not good. It's not good at
all."
In Unit C, a cell door has swung open and I can see a red
rose in a glass on the window sill. The former occupant has just been
transferred to another lower-security prison but, perhaps needing to
impart the wisdom he has learnt during his time at Halden, he has stuck a
hastily scrawled message on the magnetic whiteboard for the new inmate
who will take his place.
"To love is to give without asking for anything back," his note reads. "Loving makes you free. Free from yourself, my friend."
Some useful language:
Introduction
To start with, I would like to...
To begin with, it must be said that..
The purpose of this comment is to...
Sequencing
Firstly, .../In the first place, ... / To begin with, …To start with, I should point out that ...
Secondly,.../A second area to consider is …
Another point to remember is ...
Last but not least, I would like to add that...
Opinion
Personally I feel that ... Let me explain why.
As I see it, … The
reason is ...
It seems to
me that… This is because ...
I would argue
that for the following reasons:...
I feel very strongly
that ...
I am convinced that ...
I am inclined to
believe that...
I am of the opinion that
...
The reasons why I believe that
prisons should be more about rehabilitation are as follows...
I think it is
true that ...
I shudder to think...
- shudder: to shake because you are cold or frightened, or because of a strong feeling. E.g. Just thinking about the accident makes me shudder. Shudder to do something: I shudder to think how much this is all going to cost (= I don't want to think about it because it is too unpleasant).
In my view, ...
It is questionable
whether …
It beggars belief how a person can ever learn to be more humane without
any models of good behaviour.
It is true that ... On the other hand, ...
While nobody can deny
that ... , I would like to point out that …
At first
sight ....,but in fact ...
Although it is true that... ,
we must take into account that...
It could be argued that …
However, I would like to point out that ...
Despite all the arguments, I
still feel that ...
It may be true that ... . However, ...
In no way would I agree that...
Surely it is completely unacceptable that...Nevertheless,...
I am sure you will agree that…
Surely you must agree that…
I was extremely impressed by…
What is
particularly spectacular/interesting is…
I would like to stress that...
It should be noted that...
It is worth bearing in mind that...
I was rather disappointed by…
My overall impression was that …
On the whole, it appears/seems that ...
In general,…
Generally
speaking,…
Broadly speaking,
Strangely,…
Surprisingly,…
Evidently,…
Indeed,…
In
fact,…
Admittedly,
Admittedly: /ədˈmɪtɪdli/ used when you are accepting that something is true. Sp. cierto es que, ciertamente.
Presumably,...
Presumably: /prɪˈzjuːməbli/ used to say that you think that something is probably true. Sp. Supuestamente
While some prisoners ... , others may....
A major problem is that ...
We must take into account the fact that ....
It goes without saying that ...
Needless to say,
Without a shadow of a doubt...
I can speak from experience when I say that
The government should take action to prevent and resolve
The action taken to deal with these issues leaves a lot to be desired.
A prison system that focus on rehabilitation can make a difference.
It is also up to politicians to tackle these issues
Paraphrasing
In other words,
Or, to put it another way, ...
What I mean by that is that ...
Engaging the reader
Have you
ever wondered what/how/why...
What would your life be like if...?
What would you do if...?
Are you one of those people who ...
Isn't it extraordinary how/that...?
Imagine if/ what...
Suppose that ...
Let us suppose, for example, that...
Addition
In addition...
What is more...
Besides...
Moreover...
Furthermore...
In addition to being...
Conclusion
All things considered, I believe that ...
All in all, I think that ...
On balance, it seems to me that...
To finish with, I would like to say that...
Finally, ...
To sum up, I believe that ...
In conclusion, her actions suggest that ...
