September 29, 2017 • 42 mins
Something isn't working. American prisons are overcrowded and relapse rates are high. But why is Norway so good at helping the incarcerated become productive citizens again? And can taking away the walls and guards help? Plus, the ingenious scam Bernie Madoff pulled off in prison! (Spoiler: It involves hot chocolate.) Featuring Doran Larson.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what mango? What's that will? So I fell down
this rabbit hole. Last week I was looking up buildings
that were good for the environment, and I stumbled into
America's LEADS certified prisons. So there are a few across
the country. There's the one that Bernie Madoff is in
in Buttoner, North Carolina. There's one in California that's supposed
to be the greenest. But the one I really dived
into was this article about Coyote Ridge Corrections Facility. It's
(00:23):
in Washington State, and it's this medium security prison that
was built in two thousand and ten. And on paper,
it's pretty impressive. I mean, they've managed to reduce water
consumption by five and a half million gallons a year.
It's about four hundred thousand dollars cheaper and energy costs
than a comparable prison. They used narrow windows to trap
the heat in winter, but also to keep the place
(00:43):
cool in summer, and all of that sounds pretty good. Well,
you know, it's the first full prison campus that's completely
LEAD certified, so you think it might be beautiful as well,
But when you peek inside, it just looks like a
horrible cement prison out that that's so disheartening, and you know,
it kind of made me wonder, like, what do some
of the more interesting prisons around the world look like today,
(01:03):
and what are some of the changes that are being
made that seem to be working. So that's what today's
show is all about. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to
(01:29):
Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm
joined by my good friend man guest and the man
behind that soundproof glass is aspiring novelist and country music
legend Christin McNeil. Now, as we mentioned at the top
of the show, today's episode is looking into how to
build a better prison, and we're gonna save things like
how prisons work and great escape stories for future episodes,
(01:49):
but you know, today's show is really about how to
build a system that works better for us all. I mean,
however you feel about the humane aspects of locking people up,
the economic aspects of prison affect everybody. So we'll take
a look at how some prisons from around the globe
have reformed their approaches. Sure, so that's why you see
those YouTube videos of Filipino prisoners doing thriller together, or
(02:10):
even why Brazil allows prisoners to do book reports to
get time off their sentence for every book they read.
And and you know, that's clearly an attempt to deal
with overcrowding. And it actually kind of reminded me of
that whole pizza Hut bookt programs you participate in that
as a kid. You know, you get a pizza for
every I think it was five books that you proved
that you read. I don't know how you proved it exactly,
but you know, except in this case, you get four
(02:31):
days off for every book you write a report for.
And also it has to be grammatically perfect or it
doesn't count. But if you read twelve books, you can
get a maximum of forty eight days off your sentence.
And of course not every prisoner is eligible. But you know,
just like that one, we're going to shine a light
on a few of the innovative programs that are getting
positive results both here and abroad. Right, And obviously we
(02:53):
aren't going to come up with clear cut solutions for
such complex issues, at least not in forty minutes of chatter.
But what we can do is get a better sense
of the problem and some ways people are looking to
address them. All Right, so let's start with what people
probably already know about the US prison system, and that's
namely that it's massive. And by massive, I mean that
our country has the largest prison population in the world.
(03:15):
So that's actually not all. We also have the world's
highest prison rate. Out of every one hundred thousand Americans,
roughly seven hundred and twenty four are behind bars, and
for anyone keeping track, that's about a hundred and fifty
people more than Russia's second place. Right. Yeah, So I've
read this report from a group called the Prison Policy Initiative,
(03:35):
and it actually concluded that there are more than two
point three million people currently incarcerated in the US. And
if that doesn't sound like a lot to you, keep
in mind that the whole population of New Mexico is
just over two million. That actually does sound like a
lot to me. I'm not sure who that wouldn't sound
like a lot too, But actually, does this mean that
we have more people in jail or in prison that
we have living in an entire state? Yeah, or two
(03:58):
states if you take Delaware, US Rhode Island. I mean,
two point three million is a lot of people. It's
it's almost one percent of the national population. Wow. You know,
and of course when you factor in the family members
of the prisoners who make up that one percent, that
number actually affected by incarceration swells even larger. So I
read this Pew study that found that nearly three million
children in the US have a parent in prison. Back
(04:21):
in the nineteen seventies, that was true for about one
out of a hundred and twenty five kids, but today
it's one in twenty eight. And according to that same
Pew study, two thirds of these kids parents were incarcerated
for non violent offenses. So that that reminds me. Do
you remember that a secret museum in New York City?
I remember we covered it in previous episode, right, Yeah,
we've definitely talked about it. But for those who don't
(04:43):
know about it, it's this tiny museum that's housed an
elevator shaft, and every shelf of it's treated like its
own wing. But but the curators there had all these
giant backgrounds of things when I visited of places like
Hawaii or Greece or whatever, and and I asked what
they were, and the guys told me that their backgrounds
used to take vacation photos at prisons. Basically, prisoners can
(05:03):
save up and use their pay or good behavior to
take photos with their families in these backgrounds, so that
the families have photos with their kids that look like
they've been able to go on vacations together. And I mean,
when I saw this, I just found it so heartbreaking.
But what's worse is the recidivism rates of prisons. So
according to the Bureau of Justice, about three quarters or
seventy six point six percent of release prisoners were rearrested
(05:26):
within five years, which is a terrible track record for
US rehabilitation. Yeah, and and that's actually one of the
main problems I came across in my research as well,
is that our current system, you know, this current prison system,
it's largely designed to punish and and not to rehabilitate,
which I'm sure wasn't the initial intention. Like in Delaware history,
I remember learning about William Penn and how he and
(05:49):
other Quakers tried to change the prison system from this
sort of overcrowded and inhumane conditions they saw in London.
And one of the ways was with penitentiaries, Like the
idea was that you can go there to be penitent
and so they were totally quiet spaces and prisoners were
given their own cells and the food was simple but good,
and the whole idea was you get to think about
(06:09):
your crimes and how you want to make amends to
society once you're out, which sounds good in theory, but
in practice it was actually a terrible idea. Like this
humane idea was actually just putting people into solitary confinement,
which actually drove people crazy. That makes sense. I really
didn't think of it that way. But you know, the
history of prisons is filled with stories of good intentions
(06:30):
gone bad. And one of the things you realize in
looking at the history is that there was a major
shift in the nation's approach to prisons and the seventies
and eighties, and this around the time we became less
concerned with helping prisoners get their lives back on track
and much more interested in making sure they suffered for
their crimes. And that's when the war on drugs really started,
and also the big push to get tough on crime.
(06:52):
You know, these mandatory minimum sentences even for non violent crimes, right,
And during that time, the budgets for programs that focused
on reintegrating prisoners, like they were totally slashed, and that
was partially to build new prisons. That we're being immediately filled.
And now the results of those policy changes speak for themselves, right,
Like the prison population has more than quadrupled since the eighties,
(07:13):
which is how we get to that over two million
number we were talking about, And all of that creates
a tax burden for citizens instead of working to have
all these X cons contributing to society. Well, you know,
I think it's safe to say that the criminal justice
system doesn't work well when the only goal is to punish.
Actual reminds me there's this Ricky Gervais joke where he
talks about how Mandela went to prison for twenty seven
(07:34):
years and then never committed another crime, and that tells us,
you know, the system works, And I mean, he's mocking
the idea that you can just send someone away and
they emerge rehabilitated. But as more criminals wind up doing
hard time for low level offenses and there's a lack
of reform programs, it really just leads to this revolving
door system where prisoners are rearrested soon after they're released.
(07:57):
You know. But the real question is what are the alternative?
So are there any prisons out there that are finding
better results from a more reform based approach. So I
actually looked into this and and it turns out some
of the prisons with the lowest relapse rates also seemed
to be the most humane, and Norway in particular does
a great job with this. So one of the most
famous is this prison on Bastoy Island, where prisoners are
(08:19):
allowed to ride horses, go fishing, play tennis. They can
even go skiing. And they don't live in cramped cells
either like Instead, the roughly hundred fifteen prisoners are so
on this island, they shared these little quaint cottages and
and they also have the freedom to wear their own
clothes instead of prison uniforms. They can visit the prison
library or church or even the shop whenever they want.
(08:40):
Are you I mean this kind of sounds like a resort, man,
I'm not sure this is a prison. So I fact
checked this and it is a prison. But that's actually
the main complaint against Bastoy Like critics say the software
approach makes it feel more like a summer camp than
a correctional facility. But in its defense, best Toy isn't
all fun and games, like the inmates actually work every
(09:02):
single day. They tend to the Islands horses and sheep.
They help out on the farm. They chopped down trees
to use as firewood. I don't know. That still sounds
like camp to me. They also take part in the
specialized training programs that that teach them new skills to
use once they're released. Then some of them also helped
run the island's ferry service ferry service sheep farm. Once
(09:22):
again I have to ask, are you sure this is
a prison? So it's actually the world's first ecological prison,
and and it uses solar panels for energy, grows most
of its own food, and recycles as much as possible.
And the whole idea is for inmates to claim a
lot of personal responsibility for their actions, including how they
affect others as well as the environment. So one example
(09:43):
of this is that most of the prison staff actually
leaves the island at night by that ferry service. And
so the prisoners are expected to take care of themselves
and be on their best behavior even when they aren't
being supervised. So let me just find this quote for you.
Gerhard Plogue, who's the senior advice as are in the
Norwegian Ministry of Justice, he explained the prisons approach this way. Quote,
(10:05):
life inside prison needs to resemble life outside as much
as security considerations and resources allow. The more gradual the
transformation from imprisonment to freedom, the better the chances to
prevent reoffending. I mean, I have to admit that that
is pretty neat, but I'm curious, like is it working
or what kind of results would best would be seeing. Yeah,
so the prison has this incredibly low number of repeat offenders,
(10:28):
which is actually the norm for Norway. It's it's national
recidivism rate harrors between sixt Wow. And I wonder how
much of that is just people reoffending so they can
get back to living the good life on the prison
island resort you described. Yeah, so so Norway it has
thought about that too, and it's not at all like that.
Prisoners first have to demonstrate a willingness to change while
serving time into more traditional jail, and then they can
(10:51):
apply to like some of these more lenient prison systems
like Best Toy, But you don't have to worry about
people abusing the system. If you reoffend or try to ape,
you don't get to come back. Yeah, you know, I
wondered about people trying to escape as well. I mean
that there aren't any gates or walls or anything from
what you described, and it feels like that would make
escape pretty tempting. I don't know, I mean, except for
(11:12):
the fact that life is already so easy there, I
don't know why you'd bother to try to escape. Well,
one prisoner did escape Bestoy in two thousand fifteen. He
was paddling away from the island on a surfboard. I
love that they had a surfboard there to begin with,
but they call him pretty quickly. Okay, okay, Well, I
actually I found a different reab centric prison in Norway
and it's called Halden. And while this one doesn't offer
(11:35):
ski trips or ferry boat rides it, it does have
some features that make it feel more like, I don't know,
like a modern apartment building. So there are two d
and fifty two prisoners there, and each one has given
a private cell with a flat screen TV, a mini fridge,
and an onsuite bathroom. And you know, not only do
prisoners have access to shared spaces like kitchens and living
(11:56):
rooms and even a gym that has this rock climbing wall.
There's also a recording studio for inmates to explore their
creative sides. That's pretty awesome. So this sounds way more
urban than the rustic cottages at Bastoy. And we know
the interiors are nice, but are the prisoners are allowed
to leave the facilities? Are they allowed to go outside? Yeah, definitely.
I mean there's there's a jogging trail outside and lots
(12:16):
of benches and stone chessboards scattered through the grounds. And
unlike those Quaker prisons you were talking about, the design
is is actually meant to encourage interactions between inmates and
staff members. So guards and prisoners often eat together or
play sports together outside. And you know, the whole prison
is surrounded by this twenty ft high security wall, and
the designers left plenty of trees inside the perimeter to
(12:38):
help to obscure it, and it kind of reduces that
institutional feel of the space. And in the words of
one of the architects, the landscaping quote lets the inmates
see all the seasons. So, I mean, I know everyone
appreciates these changing colors and seeing flowers bloom, but I
can also appreciate the point of view that these kinds
of induligences might be going overboard. I mean, these prisoners
(12:59):
did break the law, so how much will we be
going out of our way to make them comfortable? I mean,
you described a summer camp earlier, and this is the
one you're taking issue with that that, you know, it
sort of goes back to that question of what's the
main goal of imprisonment, you know, because I might argue
that it's the court's job to punish a criminal by
sending them to prison, and so being separated from family
and friends and having your liberty curtailed, that is the punishment.
(13:23):
And so from that angle, the punishment has already been
carried out. But from that point on, the prisoners should
be focused on remorse and rehab. Yeah, I mean that's
a strong argument, and and really I think the only
reason this more lenient approach gives some of us pause
is that it's such a foreign concept to us. Like
we're so used to thinking of prisoners as these faceless
wrongdoers and in need of punishment that that we almost
(13:46):
want the time they serve to be miserable. It's what
we think they deserve as criminals, right, and that's also
human nature, but it is what I find refreshing about
these prisons in Norway. And as strange as that might sound,
is that they're way more hopeful about prison and reform
than we are here in the States. And I think
that's because they haven't forgotten that these are human beings
we're talking about. I mean, these are citizens who can
(14:07):
still contribute to society if if given a real chance
to do so. So I read this article about hold
in prison written by a research professor in criminology name
is Her name is Ivan Jukes, and she really nails
the importance of the rehab based approach to prison. So
she writes, this is not about making prisons softer or
less of a deterrent to criminals. Normalizing prisons is essential
(14:30):
if they are to be more than human warehouses that
return offenders to society with their lives even more fractured
and their life chances even more reduced than when they
were admitted. The short term and long term cost of imprisonment,
human and economic are staggering and unsustainable. Well, I can
definitely get behind that. In fact, why don't we dig
into some of the specifics of those costs, Like, I know,
(14:53):
we spend a crazy amount of money each year on
prison construction and upkeep, not to mention what it takes
to actually house and feed millions of in it's I'm
just gonna go ahead and rip off the band aid here.
Incarceration costs US taxpayers over seventy billion dollars each year,
and that breaks down to more than thirty thousand dollars
spent per prisoner. That is huge. Yeah, that's that's rough. Yeah,
(15:14):
And of course that's just the monetary cost of prison.
I mean, we already touched on the emotional pain that
jail time can cause, and I don't want to dwell
too much on those issues, important as they are, but
in this discussion of costs, I do think we should
talk a little bit about the jails and prisons themselves, definitely.
So I was looking at some of these figures as well,
and there are over a hundred federal prisons and close
(15:34):
to I think two thousand state ones in the US,
and many of these are massive, I mean, these sprawling
complexes that must cost a ton to build and then
to maintain of course. Yeah, And and depending on the
number of people it's meant to house, a single prison
can easily cost well over a hundred million dollars. And
like you said, we have so many correctional facilities, like
in fact, there are more than five thousand jails and
(15:56):
um county facilities like in the country right now, and
if you add those up, that's more than the total
number of colleges in the whole US well. And not
only that, but they're overcrowded. I mean, I remember this
story from just a couple of years ago about a
prison in California that gave early releases to ten thousand inmates,
and this was just ease. Overcrowding, Yeah, I mean, overcrowding
(16:16):
is obviously the serious problem, and it's it's not just
the logistical nightmare of trying to house people in a
place where there's no room for them. I mean there's
also the emotional and psychological toll of living in those conditions.
It's no secret that our environment can have this direct
impact on our behavior. I remember reading the study from
forever ago about like the proportion of fist fights that
break out when people bump into each other, and that
(16:38):
people from crowded cities were more accustomed to getting bumped
into But still, like, what kind of behavior can you
expect from people crammed into like a bleak, depressing building
and made to live together under surveillance. I mean, think
about that story you told at the top, Like, narrow
windows are great for not letting heat escape in the winter,
but what does a sliver of a view do for
(16:59):
your mental Yeah, that's true, and you know, it's easy
to imagine how the added tention of living on top
of one another, plus the disgusting food. I mean that
all might lead to outburst. And you know, of course,
bad behavior leads to more time being added to prison sentences,
which keeps people locked up for longer and makes things
harder for their families, and obviously it costs taxpayers more money.
(17:20):
It's this layered, complicated problem and it's so wide reaching. Yeah, so,
not only do we need to build a better prison
in terms of policy, we also need to physically construct
better prisons. Right. Well, we definitely shouldn't add to the
total number of prisons, since that's already way too high
as it is, but one option would be to replace
the current ones with newer models that break from the
traditional concrete box with washtower approaches. I mean, I don't
(17:44):
know who decided prison buildings need to reflect the duriness
of actually being in prison, but I'm not sure, it's
doing anyone any favors. Well, there's a couple of places
out there, like these high schools and college campuses that
I've noticed over the years that look a lot like prisons.
And I don't know if you've ever noticed this before,
but there's this uncanny resemblance between them. Sometimes. Have you
noticed this? Yeah, I mean you think about the older
(18:05):
schools that had those like boxy, boring designs and like
concrete and like drewery long hallways. I can see that, right.
So I actually decided to look into this, and it
seems that there's actually a connection between the two. Really. Yes,
So the architect responsible for the San Quentin State Prison
also designed a couple of California high schools, and that
kind of overlap isn't uncommon, I mean, especially for high
(18:27):
schools and colleges that were built in the sixties and seventies.
So I want to dig into this a little deeper.
So tell me why that is. Well, there was this
architectural style called brutalism, and this was really popular at
the time, and all kinds of public buildings and institutional
structures were built using brutalist designs. They were full of
these sharp angles and heavy solid shapes that were cast
(18:49):
in this reinforced concrete, and universities were looking to show
how modern they were, so they started using these blocky,
bunker like buildings as auditoriums or libraries or even dorms.
So then what happened Like everyone suddenly decided that these
places look like prisons. Yeah, so pretty much. I mean,
public opinion turned on them pretty quickly, and so tons
(19:09):
of students and faculty and other members of school communities
began to speak out about how ugly these new buildings were.
And it even sparked a bunch of urban legends about
colleges being built purposely to disorient and intimidate students, you know,
in order to prevent riots and political demonstrations. But you know,
at any rate, the brutal is fad died down pretty quickly,
at least for the school designs. But prison buildings, well,
(19:33):
we kept building these in the same style for decades after.
There's something about how impersonal but also functional it look
that made it perfect for jail houses. Well, brutalism is
definitely the right name for it. But you know, it's
funny you mentioned prison design influencing college architecture, because I
actually found a case of the exact opposite. There's this
new women's prison in San Diego that's been taking design
(19:55):
cues from modern college campuses. It's called the Lost Colina's
Detention and in re Entry Facility, and it's a partnership
between two architecture firms, cam D and h m C.
They work together to design this new kind of prison
that that aims to put a dent in some of
the biggest problems found in correctional facilities. And you think
about like assault, vandalism, and also recidivism. I mean that
(20:17):
sounds awesome, but but how would the architecture actually help
with this. Well, the designers also took inspiration from health
care facilities so they could make choices that would benefit
the physical and the mental well being of the inmates.
So every decision from like the color, the materials, the
texture of the buildings and their furnishings, to even the
more intangible elements like uh light, air quality, acoustics, all
(20:40):
of that was under careful consideration and based on research studies,
and everything's made to help the inmates mood and sense
of community. There's stuff like Florida ceiling windows, shorter campus
styled buildings and wide open spaces that allow for easy
access to nature. I mean that definitely sounds like an upgrade.
And you know, the that we're talking so positively about
(21:01):
a correctional facility within the United States, that's definitely a
nice change of pace. So, well, what do you say
we see what other signs of progress we can find
in the US prisons? And for that, but why don't
we break for a quiz? First? Our guest today as
(21:23):
a professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton's College,
he's also led the Attica Writer's Workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility,
and it's the director of the n e H funded
American Prison Writing Archive. Welcome to part time genius Dourin Larson, Oh,
Thanks to you. Thanks for having on so during UH
In the Atlantic piece, I read that you'd visited UH
(21:43):
for high security prisons in Denmark and Norway and Sweden
and Finland, and and one of the things I was
struck by was how you wrote about the profound difference
between how prisoners interact with the officers. Could you tell
us a little bit about that. The basis for that
is that the Scandinavian for and we really can think
of Scandinavian prisons really is one whole, because they look
(22:06):
to each other and see themselves. Really is sort of
one philosophy of of incarceration. The base philosophy that they
all work from is called normalization, and that is the
experience inside prisons should be as much like life outside
as it possibly can be, since the intent is to
prepare people to go back out and become productive, taxpaying
(22:28):
citizens once they leave. So it's an entirely forward looking
system rather than hours which is very much backward looking.
You know, we're going to keep punishing you and holding
you here until you know, there's some sort of arbitrary
decision about whether or not you suffered death. Uh. There,
it's all about preparation for leaving, and the officers are
(22:49):
very much participants in that effort. So they are there
to work with incarcerated people to prepare them to go
back out in the world old where you know, they're
returning themselves every day. Um. And that changes quite drastically
everything uh, surrounding the way they actually relate to each other.
(23:11):
And another part of that is that the ratio of
officers and staff to incarcerated people is much much higher
than it is in the US. We have about a
one to ten sometimes on certain shifts, one to twenty ratio.
So American officers are constantly under a sort of state
of siege because they're so badly outnumbered. Uh. There, it's
(23:35):
not uncommon for a prison to have a prisoner to
staff ratio of one to one. So there's not that
sense of, you know, uh, sort of being like an
occupying army, which is in some sense the way officers
um operate in the US, and some sense the way
they have to operate since we want both a mass
scale system and they have it on a cheap Yeah.
(23:55):
That that's incredible. That ratio is incredible. But I think
you said it wasn't just for the prisoners unfit, right,
It's also partially for the life of the prison guards. Yeah,
one of the motivations for making these kinds of changes,
but not simply have better results on the back end
of a prison term. Um. But the in those countries
they had a problem that we still have, which is
(24:16):
the prison officers here have a life expectancy about sixteen
years shorter than the general population. Uh. And the reason
is not from being stabbed or killed by people inside. UM,
it's hypertension, epidemic, levels of suicide, alcoholism, UM everything you
(24:37):
generally associate with a scene of continued trauma because they're
very stressful jobs. And you know, what we've learned from
other scenes of a sort of organized oppression is the
oppressors are as damaged or often as it damaged as
the people who are oppressed, because officers here really do
nothing but negative things all day. They help people what
(24:59):
not to do, they punish, they regulate, and there's nothing
that they can go home with at the end of
the day and saying I did something really positive, right,
I helped somebody out, and that has real psychological effects.
I can't I can't imagine now. You you also write
about how adjustments are made in the Scandinavian prison system
and it, you know, it sounds like the criminal justice
(25:20):
process really isn't part of the political process so much
as it is, you know, being being left to professionals.
Is that accurate? Yeah, in all those countries they've had
a long history of one. They've seen with the experience
of the world Second World War, what happens when popular
sentiment is what drives public policy right. Uh, that you
(25:44):
can you can basically whip people up into believing in
UM taking actions that are destructive for everyone. And so
with that lesson as close by as it was UM
after the war, Uh, they put an enormous amount of
faith in experts, people who are trained, uh to basically
do their jobs well on the basis of evidence and
(26:08):
the most recent science, and to put those actions in place.
And that depoliticization is obviously being challenged now because there
are you know, right wing nationalist parties coming in prominence
even in those countries. UM, But the basics, you know,
function inside prisons is really not changed. I was there
just this last summer touring Sweden with students. The recent
(26:30):
changes really just haven't penetrated there. Another thing from your
piece that I thought was fascinating was you talked a
little bit about Nile's Christie and his conclusion that these
homogeneous nations tend to institutionalize mercy. Can you speak about
that with the U S and the diverse population we
have in in our present system. Yeah, you know, the
distance between the people who are voting for any particular
(26:53):
policy or also sort of philosophy or operate from the
philosophy behind that that voting and the people that that
those decisions are gonna actually land upon the greater that
distance is the harsher the punishments tend to be. And
what Christie did is this actually came out of his
work in the Second World War and looking at who
survived in camps, in the death camps, and found that
(27:17):
it was particularly people who at some point or another
and made a human connection with the guards literally just
sort of lit a cigarette, you know, or they found
out they had a common musical interest anything that would
humanize the held from the people for the from the
human for the holders. Um. And then from that work
(27:37):
is very very early work, he looked globally and what
these patterns are like, and the pattern helped that the
extent to which the person making a decision could find
humanity and a sense of common humanity and the person
the decision was going to be made about resulted in
milder remedies for any particular problem. Right, the they want
(28:00):
to legislate just like in the family, you know, you
have different consequences for your child stealing something than you
have for your thinking about home bringings. Right, Um, you know,
one's obviously more serious, but it's not principle different. It's
a matter of you know that person, you know all
the circumstances under which they did that because they're jealous
(28:20):
of their sister or whatever the situation might have been, right, right, uh.
And Christie died just a year or two ago. But
his work he was actually called in very specifically by
Finland when they realize that their incarceration rates in the fifties,
we're out of line with other Scandinavian countries, and he
and others were called in. Academics were called in. They say,
(28:41):
what can we do to change this? That's incredible? Wow,
that's that's really interesting. Well, is is there anything the
world can learn from the US prison system? Is you know,
anything that we're we're not seeing about it. It's very
difficult to make to sort of strike any kind of
continuum really, and I'm working on an essay now about
precisely this is that we can look at the practices
(29:02):
in Scandinavia and we can ask ourselves, well, why can't
we do that what they're doing there. But there are
very very concrete reasons why translation is extremely difficult. One
is simple scale um that the entire prison calpulation of
Sweden would fit inside San Quentin. You know, on any
particular day, there are more men than women walking the
(29:26):
yards of any single prison or jail in America. That
number is great as in the entire prison population of Iceland,
which people. So these countries, in Scandinavian countries are are
quite wealthy, particularly per capita, because we have much more
even distribution of wealth and an extremely low incarceration rates,
(29:50):
So they can spend three times per incarcerated person over
what we spent, so ours an expense assist them. It's
expensive because of a size, not because of how much
we spend on individuals. So when you have those scale differences,
it's really hard to make those comparisons. It would be
fairer to say, um, you know what Sweden doing, and
(30:13):
what's Oregon doing, or what Sweden doing, and you know
what's Michigan doing. And there are progressive measures that will
be taken in individual states, but overall, of course we're
sort of just grossly over incarcerated here. I think really
what uh Europeans take from us is simply the negative lesson, right,
(30:34):
we don't want to do this because we know where
that goes. They've already done it in the US, right,
So I know you've been teaching and working with prisoners
since I think around two thousand six, Um, But what
give people hope in these high security settings and and
what do they get out of the writing? Out of
the writing? It's not simply the writing and isolated, you know,
sitting downs and going you know, it does all the
(30:55):
good that writing does for anyone, you know, a place
to reflects, as to essentially sort of sort out one's thoughts. Um.
But what I found in the setting at Attica, which
is quite a brutal prison, is that equally important was
that two or three hours in a room with other
(31:17):
men whose only priority was working on their writing and
discussing literature, not debts, not vendetta. Is not all the
other stuff politics that's going on inside the prison as
well as watching out, you know for a famously brutal staff,
but a moment in which they are there because of
the minds they bring in, not because of the bodies
(31:40):
and the objects they bring in, and that just having
that community of trust is enormously important. And then you know,
I had to sort of teach them to critique each
other because they were, so, you know, sort of universally
supportive of each other's work simply for having produced it,
which is extra ordinary in a place like that. Right,
(32:02):
But over time, you know, they learned that, you know,
as great as it is as someone's produced a piece
of work, you can also help them along by pointing
out what's problematic in it, all right, yea. And those
that have published, and they published extremely well, uh, The
New York Times, Atlantic, Um, Harper's Esquire, a lot of
(32:23):
top literary journals. Um. You know those moments when you
see your name in print. Really, and I've had men
tell me this explicitly. I'm no longer just my crime.
I'm now a writer. That's how people know me. And
maybe more people will know me as that than the
people who see me as nothing more as literally sort
(32:44):
of disappearing behind my crime. So it can be a
real transformation of self conception and self image, which is very,
very constructive for them. So for our listeners that are
interested in reading more and learning more, they should definitely
check out a book that Dorin edited called Fourth City,
Essays from the Prison in America. But Dorian, thank you
(33:05):
so much for joining us today. Of course, of course,
thank you. Okay, So Mango, you were really lifting my
spirits talking about the Los Collinas Detention and re Entry Facility,
(33:28):
And I like it because it seems to adopt the
same humane approach to incarceration that we saw in those
Norwegian jails, and it's really just cool to see that
way of thinking taking root in the American prison system. Yeah, definitely.
Instead of the typically like stark and alienating environments we
associate with prisons, these are more like tight knit communities,
almost like a college campus or a small village, and
(33:50):
that ends up feeling way healthier than just a people warehouse. Well.
Building a sense of community and purpose is actually a
common thread that I noticed in lots of prison programs
that aim for rehab and reintegration. And one of my
favorites is a program organized by a nonprofit called Hudson
Link for Higher Education in Prison. So in this program
that they allow inmates to enroll in college courses that
(34:12):
count toward a degree once they've been released. So for
the last nineteen years, the group has partnered with eight colleges,
one of them being Columbia University, to offer classes two
inmates at six different correctional facilities. So the program's aim
is to increase the chance of employment upon release and
reduce recidivism, and so far it seems to be working.
I mean, release prisoners who have taken classes offer through
(34:34):
Hudson Link have a recidivism rate of less than two percent.
That's unbelievable. So what kind of stuff are they studying.
It's a little bit of everything, really. I Mean one
of the courses from last year was a literature humanities class,
so they read and discussed ideas from ancient authors like
Homer and Virgil, which sounds heavy, but uh, how's that
help in the real world. I mean I feel like
(34:56):
a college parent talking right now, right exactly. Well, you know,
just like any liberal art student will tell you. You know,
studying classics helps develop critical thinking skills, and so you
don't learn just how to read well or write well
or speak well. You learn how to think well too,
and and that can be useful for people who are
interested in, you know, better life choices. But according to
the course instructor, professor Laura kol Kowski, there's also another
(35:19):
benefit to engaging with these books. She says it can
help students gain more confidence, so they feel more comfortable
taking part in other debates once they're released. As she
puts it, there's really a deep value for them to
feel like, yeah, I can read this stuff and talk
about it. I'm part of a civil society and can
be part of a larger conversation. Yeah. I can definitely
see that, and and I'm definitely for any program that
(35:40):
helps prisoners find their voice. Again, speaking of it, have
you been listening to Your Hustle? Oh? I haven't. I'm
actually so glad you brought it up, because I was
going to if you didn't. Yeah, So, for any listeners
who haven't checked it out yet, Your Hustle is this
bi weekly podcast about life inside San Quentin State Prison.
And that's interesting enough right there. But the really cool
thing is that it's created and recorded and also produced
(36:02):
by two current inmates and this volunteer local artist, all
in the very limited free time they have every week,
and one of the inmates or long Woods co hosts,
and this other guy, Anton Williams, handles all the show's
sound design. It's all done through a keyboard bar from
the Prisons Media Lab. It's pretty awesome, and it reminds
you that these are human beings. We're talking about. Yeah,
(36:22):
it is amazing, And your hustle is full of interviews
with different prisoners on all sorts of topics. So they'll
cover things like justice and regret and love and race
and isolation, but also more mundane things like you know,
food and pets and disagreements with cellmates. It's definitely worth
a lessen. Yeah, but but it's also just like this
great example of what a program that invests in prisoners
(36:43):
as people can lead to. Yeah, you know, And because
we're talking about the importance of giving prisoners a voice,
I want to share Wood's own take on what he
considers the aim of the podcast. So he writes, I
want the listeners to be able to relate to the
struggles that we go through on a day to day
basis and not get caught up in the US versus
them mentality. We're all the same. Some of us just
(37:05):
took different routes and needed a time out and a
little rehabilitation to get back to responsible behavior. So I know,
we started by acknowledging that fixing the entire prison system
is beyond the scope of our forty five minute podcast.
But wait, are you about to tell us how to
fix the entire prison system. Yeah, definitely not. And I
know I'm at risk of sounding like a p s
A here, but I would encourage anyone who's heard anything
(37:27):
on today's show that surprised them to do your own
research and even let your congressman or women know about
anything you find you don't like. It might sound silly
or Pollyanna, but just raising awareness about problems in the
prison system can really help make those two plus million
citizens who are part of it feel a little less invisible. Yeah,
I think you're right, Mango. I mean, it's definitely a start,
(37:48):
but um, you know, I don't want you to think
that your p s A announcement will win you any
sympathy in today's fact off, just to be clear about that.
So I gotta kick this off with one person who
definitely doesn't seem to have been rehabilitated. Courts reported that
(38:10):
in prison Bernie made Off, who scammed America out of
so much money, used as economic savvy to corner the
hot chocolate market and then sell it into prison yard
at high margin. Friendly Anyone who wanted some of that
sweet Swissmas needed to go through Uncle Bernie to get
a taste. He clearly feels a lot of regret for
what he's done. That's crazy, all right. Well, here's the
(38:32):
fact I found surprising about a Spanish prison called r
O S, which is notable for having cells for families.
But normally, if an inmate has a baby, the child
is sent to foster care to live with relatives. But
here the child is allowed to stay with their parents
until they're three years old. The children have toys and
other kids to play with, and the bonding is supposed
(38:53):
to not only help the child but give the parents
something to look forward to after their sentences served. So
this one totally baffled me. But have you heard that
prison authorities in Abu Dhabi are planning a jail where
inmates could serve their sentences without ever meeting a prison guard.
So how does that work? So instead of interacting with guards,
this humane prison has people communicating with quote social workers, trainers, psychologists, counselors,
(39:18):
and medical staff and they continue uh quote. Security guards
will be available behind the scenes, but asked to intervene
only when necessary. Definitely curious to see how that works.
All right. Here here's what I found curious about the
Civil War prison camp in Elmira, New York. Apparently the
prison camp had two observation towers for visitors where they
had concession stands selling peanuts, lemonade, and cakes, all while
(39:41):
you watched people suffering below. That's so gross. Also, it's
a little different than the Philippines prisons where they charge
visitors to watch them dance to thriller in Greece, I
mean that's to make money for the facilities. But speaking
of entertainment, did you know that the opening song of
the Coen Brothers movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Was
actually an old track from nine recorded by prisoners. The
(40:03):
most amazing part is that forty years later, the Coen
Brothers actually tracked down one of the prisoners, this guy
named James Carter, and paid him royalties. Oh that's perfect.
I've actually got one about a different James Carter. And
this is an incredible story I read in the New
York Times about Jimmy Carter. Apparently, this woman, Mary Prince,
who had been convicted of murder, was assigned to work
at the Governor's mansion and a work release program when
(40:25):
he was there, and after Carter spent time with her,
he became so convinced that she was innocent, that he
applied to be her parole officer. Also he could take
her to the White House to be his daughter's nanny.
Prince was eventually pardoned, but it's kind of an unbelievable story.
Oh I like that one. And ending this on a
hopeful note. So you in today's trophy, and that's it
(40:45):
for today's Part Time Genius. As always, if you've got
comments or feedback, please don't hesitate to write us at
part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com or
hit us up on our seven fact hotline four four
pt Genius. So that's eve it is, thanks again for listening.
(41:15):
Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works
and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. CHRISTA
McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme
song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland
does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher,
with support from the research army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams, and even Jeff Cook gets the
(41:37):
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Do we do we forget Jason?
Jason who
Guess what mango? What's that will? So I fell down
this rabbit hole. Last week I was looking up buildings
that were good for the environment, and I stumbled into
America's LEADS certified prisons. So there are a few across
the country. There's the one that Bernie Madoff is in
in Buttoner, North Carolina. There's one in California that's supposed
to be the greenest. But the one I really dived
into was this article about Coyote Ridge Corrections Facility. It's
(00:23):
in Washington State, and it's this medium security prison that
was built in two thousand and ten. And on paper,
it's pretty impressive. I mean, they've managed to reduce water
consumption by five and a half million gallons a year.
It's about four hundred thousand dollars cheaper and energy costs
than a comparable prison. They used narrow windows to trap
the heat in winter, but also to keep the place
(00:43):
cool in summer, and all of that sounds pretty good. Well,
you know, it's the first full prison campus that's completely
LEAD certified, so you think it might be beautiful as well,
But when you peek inside, it just looks like a
horrible cement prison out that that's so disheartening, and you know,
it kind of made me wonder, like, what do some
of the more interesting prisons around the world look like today,
(01:03):
and what are some of the changes that are being
made that seem to be working. So that's what today's
show is all about. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to
(01:29):
Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm
joined by my good friend man guest and the man
behind that soundproof glass is aspiring novelist and country music
legend Christin McNeil. Now, as we mentioned at the top
of the show, today's episode is looking into how to
build a better prison, and we're gonna save things like
how prisons work and great escape stories for future episodes,
(01:49):
but you know, today's show is really about how to
build a system that works better for us all. I mean,
however you feel about the humane aspects of locking people up,
the economic aspects of prison affect everybody. So we'll take
a look at how some prisons from around the globe
have reformed their approaches. Sure, so that's why you see
those YouTube videos of Filipino prisoners doing thriller together, or
(02:10):
even why Brazil allows prisoners to do book reports to
get time off their sentence for every book they read.
And and you know, that's clearly an attempt to deal
with overcrowding. And it actually kind of reminded me of
that whole pizza Hut bookt programs you participate in that
as a kid. You know, you get a pizza for
every I think it was five books that you proved
that you read. I don't know how you proved it exactly,
but you know, except in this case, you get four
(02:31):
days off for every book you write a report for.
And also it has to be grammatically perfect or it
doesn't count. But if you read twelve books, you can
get a maximum of forty eight days off your sentence.
And of course not every prisoner is eligible. But you know,
just like that one, we're going to shine a light
on a few of the innovative programs that are getting
positive results both here and abroad. Right, And obviously we
(02:53):
aren't going to come up with clear cut solutions for
such complex issues, at least not in forty minutes of chatter.
But what we can do is get a better sense
of the problem and some ways people are looking to
address them. All Right, so let's start with what people
probably already know about the US prison system, and that's
namely that it's massive. And by massive, I mean that
our country has the largest prison population in the world.
(03:15):
So that's actually not all. We also have the world's
highest prison rate. Out of every one hundred thousand Americans,
roughly seven hundred and twenty four are behind bars, and
for anyone keeping track, that's about a hundred and fifty
people more than Russia's second place. Right. Yeah, So I've
read this report from a group called the Prison Policy Initiative,
(03:35):
and it actually concluded that there are more than two
point three million people currently incarcerated in the US. And
if that doesn't sound like a lot to you, keep
in mind that the whole population of New Mexico is
just over two million. That actually does sound like a
lot to me. I'm not sure who that wouldn't sound
like a lot too, But actually, does this mean that
we have more people in jail or in prison that
we have living in an entire state? Yeah, or two
(03:58):
states if you take Delaware, US Rhode Island. I mean,
two point three million is a lot of people. It's
it's almost one percent of the national population. Wow. You know,
and of course when you factor in the family members
of the prisoners who make up that one percent, that
number actually affected by incarceration swells even larger. So I
read this Pew study that found that nearly three million
children in the US have a parent in prison. Back
(04:21):
in the nineteen seventies, that was true for about one
out of a hundred and twenty five kids, but today
it's one in twenty eight. And according to that same
Pew study, two thirds of these kids parents were incarcerated
for non violent offenses. So that that reminds me. Do
you remember that a secret museum in New York City?
I remember we covered it in previous episode, right, Yeah,
we've definitely talked about it. But for those who don't
(04:43):
know about it, it's this tiny museum that's housed an
elevator shaft, and every shelf of it's treated like its
own wing. But but the curators there had all these
giant backgrounds of things when I visited of places like
Hawaii or Greece or whatever, and and I asked what
they were, and the guys told me that their backgrounds
used to take vacation photos at prisons. Basically, prisoners can
(05:03):
save up and use their pay or good behavior to
take photos with their families in these backgrounds, so that
the families have photos with their kids that look like
they've been able to go on vacations together. And I mean,
when I saw this, I just found it so heartbreaking.
But what's worse is the recidivism rates of prisons. So
according to the Bureau of Justice, about three quarters or
seventy six point six percent of release prisoners were rearrested
(05:26):
within five years, which is a terrible track record for
US rehabilitation. Yeah, and and that's actually one of the
main problems I came across in my research as well,
is that our current system, you know, this current prison system,
it's largely designed to punish and and not to rehabilitate,
which I'm sure wasn't the initial intention. Like in Delaware history,
I remember learning about William Penn and how he and
(05:49):
other Quakers tried to change the prison system from this
sort of overcrowded and inhumane conditions they saw in London.
And one of the ways was with penitentiaries, Like the
idea was that you can go there to be penitent
and so they were totally quiet spaces and prisoners were
given their own cells and the food was simple but good,
and the whole idea was you get to think about
(06:09):
your crimes and how you want to make amends to
society once you're out, which sounds good in theory, but
in practice it was actually a terrible idea. Like this
humane idea was actually just putting people into solitary confinement,
which actually drove people crazy. That makes sense. I really
didn't think of it that way. But you know, the
history of prisons is filled with stories of good intentions
(06:30):
gone bad. And one of the things you realize in
looking at the history is that there was a major
shift in the nation's approach to prisons and the seventies
and eighties, and this around the time we became less
concerned with helping prisoners get their lives back on track
and much more interested in making sure they suffered for
their crimes. And that's when the war on drugs really started,
and also the big push to get tough on crime.
(06:52):
You know, these mandatory minimum sentences even for non violent crimes, right,
And during that time, the budgets for programs that focused
on reintegrating prisoners, like they were totally slashed, and that
was partially to build new prisons. That we're being immediately filled.
And now the results of those policy changes speak for themselves, right,
Like the prison population has more than quadrupled since the eighties,
(07:13):
which is how we get to that over two million
number we were talking about, And all of that creates
a tax burden for citizens instead of working to have
all these X cons contributing to society. Well, you know,
I think it's safe to say that the criminal justice
system doesn't work well when the only goal is to punish.
Actual reminds me there's this Ricky Gervais joke where he
talks about how Mandela went to prison for twenty seven
(07:34):
years and then never committed another crime, and that tells us,
you know, the system works, And I mean, he's mocking
the idea that you can just send someone away and
they emerge rehabilitated. But as more criminals wind up doing
hard time for low level offenses and there's a lack
of reform programs, it really just leads to this revolving
door system where prisoners are rearrested soon after they're released.
(07:57):
You know. But the real question is what are the alternative?
So are there any prisons out there that are finding
better results from a more reform based approach. So I
actually looked into this and and it turns out some
of the prisons with the lowest relapse rates also seemed
to be the most humane, and Norway in particular does
a great job with this. So one of the most
famous is this prison on Bastoy Island, where prisoners are
(08:19):
allowed to ride horses, go fishing, play tennis. They can
even go skiing. And they don't live in cramped cells
either like Instead, the roughly hundred fifteen prisoners are so
on this island, they shared these little quaint cottages and
and they also have the freedom to wear their own
clothes instead of prison uniforms. They can visit the prison
library or church or even the shop whenever they want.
(08:40):
Are you I mean this kind of sounds like a resort, man,
I'm not sure this is a prison. So I fact
checked this and it is a prison. But that's actually
the main complaint against Bastoy Like critics say the software
approach makes it feel more like a summer camp than
a correctional facility. But in its defense, best Toy isn't
all fun and games, like the inmates actually work every
(09:02):
single day. They tend to the Islands horses and sheep.
They help out on the farm. They chopped down trees
to use as firewood. I don't know. That still sounds
like camp to me. They also take part in the
specialized training programs that that teach them new skills to
use once they're released. Then some of them also helped
run the island's ferry service ferry service sheep farm. Once
(09:22):
again I have to ask, are you sure this is
a prison? So it's actually the world's first ecological prison,
and and it uses solar panels for energy, grows most
of its own food, and recycles as much as possible.
And the whole idea is for inmates to claim a
lot of personal responsibility for their actions, including how they
affect others as well as the environment. So one example
(09:43):
of this is that most of the prison staff actually
leaves the island at night by that ferry service. And
so the prisoners are expected to take care of themselves
and be on their best behavior even when they aren't
being supervised. So let me just find this quote for you.
Gerhard Plogue, who's the senior advice as are in the
Norwegian Ministry of Justice, he explained the prisons approach this way. Quote,
(10:05):
life inside prison needs to resemble life outside as much
as security considerations and resources allow. The more gradual the
transformation from imprisonment to freedom, the better the chances to
prevent reoffending. I mean, I have to admit that that
is pretty neat, but I'm curious, like is it working
or what kind of results would best would be seeing. Yeah,
so the prison has this incredibly low number of repeat offenders,
(10:28):
which is actually the norm for Norway. It's it's national
recidivism rate harrors between sixt Wow. And I wonder how
much of that is just people reoffending so they can
get back to living the good life on the prison
island resort you described. Yeah, so so Norway it has
thought about that too, and it's not at all like that.
Prisoners first have to demonstrate a willingness to change while
serving time into more traditional jail, and then they can
(10:51):
apply to like some of these more lenient prison systems
like Best Toy, But you don't have to worry about
people abusing the system. If you reoffend or try to ape,
you don't get to come back. Yeah, you know, I
wondered about people trying to escape as well. I mean
that there aren't any gates or walls or anything from
what you described, and it feels like that would make
escape pretty tempting. I don't know, I mean, except for
(11:12):
the fact that life is already so easy there, I
don't know why you'd bother to try to escape. Well,
one prisoner did escape Bestoy in two thousand fifteen. He
was paddling away from the island on a surfboard. I
love that they had a surfboard there to begin with,
but they call him pretty quickly. Okay, okay, Well, I
actually I found a different reab centric prison in Norway
and it's called Halden. And while this one doesn't offer
(11:35):
ski trips or ferry boat rides it, it does have
some features that make it feel more like, I don't know,
like a modern apartment building. So there are two d
and fifty two prisoners there, and each one has given
a private cell with a flat screen TV, a mini fridge,
and an onsuite bathroom. And you know, not only do
prisoners have access to shared spaces like kitchens and living
(11:56):
rooms and even a gym that has this rock climbing wall.
There's also a recording studio for inmates to explore their
creative sides. That's pretty awesome. So this sounds way more
urban than the rustic cottages at Bastoy. And we know
the interiors are nice, but are the prisoners are allowed
to leave the facilities? Are they allowed to go outside? Yeah, definitely.
I mean there's there's a jogging trail outside and lots
(12:16):
of benches and stone chessboards scattered through the grounds. And
unlike those Quaker prisons you were talking about, the design
is is actually meant to encourage interactions between inmates and
staff members. So guards and prisoners often eat together or
play sports together outside. And you know, the whole prison
is surrounded by this twenty ft high security wall, and
the designers left plenty of trees inside the perimeter to
(12:38):
help to obscure it, and it kind of reduces that
institutional feel of the space. And in the words of
one of the architects, the landscaping quote lets the inmates
see all the seasons. So, I mean, I know everyone
appreciates these changing colors and seeing flowers bloom, but I
can also appreciate the point of view that these kinds
of induligences might be going overboard. I mean, these prisoners
(12:59):
did break the law, so how much will we be
going out of our way to make them comfortable? I mean,
you described a summer camp earlier, and this is the
one you're taking issue with that that, you know, it
sort of goes back to that question of what's the
main goal of imprisonment, you know, because I might argue
that it's the court's job to punish a criminal by
sending them to prison, and so being separated from family
and friends and having your liberty curtailed, that is the punishment.
(13:23):
And so from that angle, the punishment has already been
carried out. But from that point on, the prisoners should
be focused on remorse and rehab. Yeah, I mean that's
a strong argument, and and really I think the only
reason this more lenient approach gives some of us pause
is that it's such a foreign concept to us. Like
we're so used to thinking of prisoners as these faceless
wrongdoers and in need of punishment that that we almost
(13:46):
want the time they serve to be miserable. It's what
we think they deserve as criminals, right, and that's also
human nature, but it is what I find refreshing about
these prisons in Norway. And as strange as that might sound,
is that they're way more hopeful about prison and reform
than we are here in the States. And I think
that's because they haven't forgotten that these are human beings
we're talking about. I mean, these are citizens who can
(14:07):
still contribute to society if if given a real chance
to do so. So I read this article about hold
in prison written by a research professor in criminology name
is Her name is Ivan Jukes, and she really nails
the importance of the rehab based approach to prison. So
she writes, this is not about making prisons softer or
less of a deterrent to criminals. Normalizing prisons is essential
(14:30):
if they are to be more than human warehouses that
return offenders to society with their lives even more fractured
and their life chances even more reduced than when they
were admitted. The short term and long term cost of imprisonment,
human and economic are staggering and unsustainable. Well, I can
definitely get behind that. In fact, why don't we dig
into some of the specifics of those costs, Like, I know,
(14:53):
we spend a crazy amount of money each year on
prison construction and upkeep, not to mention what it takes
to actually house and feed millions of in it's I'm
just gonna go ahead and rip off the band aid here.
Incarceration costs US taxpayers over seventy billion dollars each year,
and that breaks down to more than thirty thousand dollars
spent per prisoner. That is huge. Yeah, that's that's rough. Yeah,
(15:14):
And of course that's just the monetary cost of prison.
I mean, we already touched on the emotional pain that
jail time can cause, and I don't want to dwell
too much on those issues, important as they are, but
in this discussion of costs, I do think we should
talk a little bit about the jails and prisons themselves, definitely.
So I was looking at some of these figures as well,
and there are over a hundred federal prisons and close
(15:34):
to I think two thousand state ones in the US,
and many of these are massive, I mean, these sprawling
complexes that must cost a ton to build and then
to maintain of course. Yeah, And and depending on the
number of people it's meant to house, a single prison
can easily cost well over a hundred million dollars. And
like you said, we have so many correctional facilities, like
in fact, there are more than five thousand jails and
(15:56):
um county facilities like in the country right now, and
if you add those up, that's more than the total
number of colleges in the whole US well. And not
only that, but they're overcrowded. I mean, I remember this
story from just a couple of years ago about a
prison in California that gave early releases to ten thousand inmates,
and this was just ease. Overcrowding, Yeah, I mean, overcrowding
(16:16):
is obviously the serious problem, and it's it's not just
the logistical nightmare of trying to house people in a
place where there's no room for them. I mean there's
also the emotional and psychological toll of living in those conditions.
It's no secret that our environment can have this direct
impact on our behavior. I remember reading the study from
forever ago about like the proportion of fist fights that
break out when people bump into each other, and that
(16:38):
people from crowded cities were more accustomed to getting bumped
into But still, like, what kind of behavior can you
expect from people crammed into like a bleak, depressing building
and made to live together under surveillance. I mean, think
about that story you told at the top, Like, narrow
windows are great for not letting heat escape in the winter,
but what does a sliver of a view do for
(16:59):
your mental Yeah, that's true, and you know, it's easy
to imagine how the added tention of living on top
of one another, plus the disgusting food. I mean that
all might lead to outburst. And you know, of course,
bad behavior leads to more time being added to prison sentences,
which keeps people locked up for longer and makes things
harder for their families, and obviously it costs taxpayers more money.
(17:20):
It's this layered, complicated problem and it's so wide reaching. Yeah, so,
not only do we need to build a better prison
in terms of policy, we also need to physically construct
better prisons. Right. Well, we definitely shouldn't add to the
total number of prisons, since that's already way too high
as it is, but one option would be to replace
the current ones with newer models that break from the
traditional concrete box with washtower approaches. I mean, I don't
(17:44):
know who decided prison buildings need to reflect the duriness
of actually being in prison, but I'm not sure, it's
doing anyone any favors. Well, there's a couple of places
out there, like these high schools and college campuses that
I've noticed over the years that look a lot like prisons.
And I don't know if you've ever noticed this before,
but there's this uncanny resemblance between them. Sometimes. Have you
noticed this? Yeah, I mean you think about the older
(18:05):
schools that had those like boxy, boring designs and like
concrete and like drewery long hallways. I can see that, right.
So I actually decided to look into this, and it
seems that there's actually a connection between the two. Really. Yes,
So the architect responsible for the San Quentin State Prison
also designed a couple of California high schools, and that
kind of overlap isn't uncommon, I mean, especially for high
(18:27):
schools and colleges that were built in the sixties and seventies.
So I want to dig into this a little deeper.
So tell me why that is. Well, there was this
architectural style called brutalism, and this was really popular at
the time, and all kinds of public buildings and institutional
structures were built using brutalist designs. They were full of
these sharp angles and heavy solid shapes that were cast
(18:49):
in this reinforced concrete, and universities were looking to show
how modern they were, so they started using these blocky,
bunker like buildings as auditoriums or libraries or even dorms.
So then what happened Like everyone suddenly decided that these
places look like prisons. Yeah, so pretty much. I mean,
public opinion turned on them pretty quickly, and so tons
(19:09):
of students and faculty and other members of school communities
began to speak out about how ugly these new buildings were.
And it even sparked a bunch of urban legends about
colleges being built purposely to disorient and intimidate students, you know,
in order to prevent riots and political demonstrations. But you know,
at any rate, the brutal is fad died down pretty quickly,
at least for the school designs. But prison buildings, well,
(19:33):
we kept building these in the same style for decades after.
There's something about how impersonal but also functional it look
that made it perfect for jail houses. Well, brutalism is
definitely the right name for it. But you know, it's
funny you mentioned prison design influencing college architecture, because I
actually found a case of the exact opposite. There's this
new women's prison in San Diego that's been taking design
(19:55):
cues from modern college campuses. It's called the Lost Colina's
Detention and in re Entry Facility, and it's a partnership
between two architecture firms, cam D and h m C.
They work together to design this new kind of prison
that that aims to put a dent in some of
the biggest problems found in correctional facilities. And you think
about like assault, vandalism, and also recidivism. I mean that
(20:17):
sounds awesome, but but how would the architecture actually help
with this. Well, the designers also took inspiration from health
care facilities so they could make choices that would benefit
the physical and the mental well being of the inmates.
So every decision from like the color, the materials, the
texture of the buildings and their furnishings, to even the
more intangible elements like uh light, air quality, acoustics, all
(20:40):
of that was under careful consideration and based on research studies,
and everything's made to help the inmates mood and sense
of community. There's stuff like Florida ceiling windows, shorter campus
styled buildings and wide open spaces that allow for easy
access to nature. I mean that definitely sounds like an upgrade.
And you know, the that we're talking so positively about
(21:01):
a correctional facility within the United States, that's definitely a
nice change of pace. So, well, what do you say
we see what other signs of progress we can find
in the US prisons? And for that, but why don't
we break for a quiz? First? Our guest today as
(21:23):
a professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton's College,
he's also led the Attica Writer's Workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility,
and it's the director of the n e H funded
American Prison Writing Archive. Welcome to part time genius Dourin Larson, Oh,
Thanks to you. Thanks for having on so during UH
In the Atlantic piece, I read that you'd visited UH
(21:43):
for high security prisons in Denmark and Norway and Sweden
and Finland, and and one of the things I was
struck by was how you wrote about the profound difference
between how prisoners interact with the officers. Could you tell
us a little bit about that. The basis for that
is that the Scandinavian for and we really can think
of Scandinavian prisons really is one whole, because they look
(22:06):
to each other and see themselves. Really is sort of
one philosophy of of incarceration. The base philosophy that they
all work from is called normalization, and that is the
experience inside prisons should be as much like life outside
as it possibly can be, since the intent is to
prepare people to go back out and become productive, taxpaying
(22:28):
citizens once they leave. So it's an entirely forward looking
system rather than hours which is very much backward looking.
You know, we're going to keep punishing you and holding
you here until you know, there's some sort of arbitrary
decision about whether or not you suffered death. Uh. There,
it's all about preparation for leaving, and the officers are
(22:49):
very much participants in that effort. So they are there
to work with incarcerated people to prepare them to go
back out in the world old where you know, they're
returning themselves every day. Um. And that changes quite drastically
everything uh, surrounding the way they actually relate to each other.
(23:11):
And another part of that is that the ratio of
officers and staff to incarcerated people is much much higher
than it is in the US. We have about a
one to ten sometimes on certain shifts, one to twenty ratio.
So American officers are constantly under a sort of state
of siege because they're so badly outnumbered. Uh. There, it's
(23:35):
not uncommon for a prison to have a prisoner to
staff ratio of one to one. So there's not that
sense of, you know, uh, sort of being like an
occupying army, which is in some sense the way officers
um operate in the US, and some sense the way
they have to operate since we want both a mass
scale system and they have it on a cheap Yeah.
(23:55):
That that's incredible. That ratio is incredible. But I think
you said it wasn't just for the prisoners unfit, right,
It's also partially for the life of the prison guards. Yeah,
one of the motivations for making these kinds of changes,
but not simply have better results on the back end
of a prison term. Um. But the in those countries
they had a problem that we still have, which is
(24:16):
the prison officers here have a life expectancy about sixteen
years shorter than the general population. Uh. And the reason
is not from being stabbed or killed by people inside. UM,
it's hypertension, epidemic, levels of suicide, alcoholism, UM everything you
(24:37):
generally associate with a scene of continued trauma because they're
very stressful jobs. And you know, what we've learned from
other scenes of a sort of organized oppression is the
oppressors are as damaged or often as it damaged as
the people who are oppressed, because officers here really do
nothing but negative things all day. They help people what
(24:59):
not to do, they punish, they regulate, and there's nothing
that they can go home with at the end of
the day and saying I did something really positive, right,
I helped somebody out, and that has real psychological effects.
I can't I can't imagine now. You you also write
about how adjustments are made in the Scandinavian prison system
and it, you know, it sounds like the criminal justice
(25:20):
process really isn't part of the political process so much
as it is, you know, being being left to professionals.
Is that accurate? Yeah, in all those countries they've had
a long history of one. They've seen with the experience
of the world Second World War, what happens when popular
sentiment is what drives public policy right. Uh, that you
(25:44):
can you can basically whip people up into believing in
UM taking actions that are destructive for everyone. And so
with that lesson as close by as it was UM
after the war, Uh, they put an enormous amount of
faith in experts, people who are trained, uh to basically
do their jobs well on the basis of evidence and
(26:08):
the most recent science, and to put those actions in place.
And that depoliticization is obviously being challenged now because there
are you know, right wing nationalist parties coming in prominence
even in those countries. UM, But the basics, you know,
function inside prisons is really not changed. I was there
just this last summer touring Sweden with students. The recent
(26:30):
changes really just haven't penetrated there. Another thing from your
piece that I thought was fascinating was you talked a
little bit about Nile's Christie and his conclusion that these
homogeneous nations tend to institutionalize mercy. Can you speak about
that with the U S and the diverse population we
have in in our present system. Yeah, you know, the
distance between the people who are voting for any particular
(26:53):
policy or also sort of philosophy or operate from the
philosophy behind that that voting and the people that that
those decisions are gonna actually land upon the greater that
distance is the harsher the punishments tend to be. And
what Christie did is this actually came out of his
work in the Second World War and looking at who
survived in camps, in the death camps, and found that
(27:17):
it was particularly people who at some point or another
and made a human connection with the guards literally just
sort of lit a cigarette, you know, or they found
out they had a common musical interest anything that would
humanize the held from the people for the from the
human for the holders. Um. And then from that work
(27:37):
is very very early work, he looked globally and what
these patterns are like, and the pattern helped that the
extent to which the person making a decision could find
humanity and a sense of common humanity and the person
the decision was going to be made about resulted in
milder remedies for any particular problem. Right, the they want
(28:00):
to legislate just like in the family, you know, you
have different consequences for your child stealing something than you
have for your thinking about home bringings. Right, Um, you know,
one's obviously more serious, but it's not principle different. It's
a matter of you know that person, you know all
the circumstances under which they did that because they're jealous
(28:20):
of their sister or whatever the situation might have been, right, right, uh.
And Christie died just a year or two ago. But
his work he was actually called in very specifically by
Finland when they realize that their incarceration rates in the fifties,
we're out of line with other Scandinavian countries, and he
and others were called in. Academics were called in. They say,
(28:41):
what can we do to change this? That's incredible? Wow,
that's that's really interesting. Well, is is there anything the
world can learn from the US prison system? Is you know,
anything that we're we're not seeing about it. It's very
difficult to make to sort of strike any kind of
continuum really, and I'm working on an essay now about
precisely this is that we can look at the practices
(29:02):
in Scandinavia and we can ask ourselves, well, why can't
we do that what they're doing there. But there are
very very concrete reasons why translation is extremely difficult. One
is simple scale um that the entire prison calpulation of
Sweden would fit inside San Quentin. You know, on any
particular day, there are more men than women walking the
(29:26):
yards of any single prison or jail in America. That
number is great as in the entire prison population of Iceland,
which people. So these countries, in Scandinavian countries are are
quite wealthy, particularly per capita, because we have much more
even distribution of wealth and an extremely low incarceration rates,
(29:50):
So they can spend three times per incarcerated person over
what we spent, so ours an expense assist them. It's
expensive because of a size, not because of how much
we spend on individuals. So when you have those scale differences,
it's really hard to make those comparisons. It would be
fairer to say, um, you know what Sweden doing, and
(30:13):
what's Oregon doing, or what Sweden doing, and you know
what's Michigan doing. And there are progressive measures that will
be taken in individual states, but overall, of course we're
sort of just grossly over incarcerated here. I think really
what uh Europeans take from us is simply the negative lesson, right,
(30:34):
we don't want to do this because we know where
that goes. They've already done it in the US, right,
So I know you've been teaching and working with prisoners
since I think around two thousand six, Um, But what
give people hope in these high security settings and and
what do they get out of the writing? Out of
the writing? It's not simply the writing and isolated, you know,
sitting downs and going you know, it does all the
(30:55):
good that writing does for anyone, you know, a place
to reflects, as to essentially sort of sort out one's thoughts. Um.
But what I found in the setting at Attica, which
is quite a brutal prison, is that equally important was
that two or three hours in a room with other
(31:17):
men whose only priority was working on their writing and
discussing literature, not debts, not vendetta. Is not all the
other stuff politics that's going on inside the prison as
well as watching out, you know for a famously brutal staff,
but a moment in which they are there because of
the minds they bring in, not because of the bodies
(31:40):
and the objects they bring in, and that just having
that community of trust is enormously important. And then you know,
I had to sort of teach them to critique each
other because they were, so, you know, sort of universally
supportive of each other's work simply for having produced it,
which is extra ordinary in a place like that. Right,
(32:02):
But over time, you know, they learned that, you know,
as great as it is as someone's produced a piece
of work, you can also help them along by pointing
out what's problematic in it, all right, yea. And those
that have published, and they published extremely well, uh, The
New York Times, Atlantic, Um, Harper's Esquire, a lot of
(32:23):
top literary journals. Um. You know those moments when you
see your name in print. Really, and I've had men
tell me this explicitly. I'm no longer just my crime.
I'm now a writer. That's how people know me. And
maybe more people will know me as that than the
people who see me as nothing more as literally sort
(32:44):
of disappearing behind my crime. So it can be a
real transformation of self conception and self image, which is very,
very constructive for them. So for our listeners that are
interested in reading more and learning more, they should definitely
check out a book that Dorin edited called Fourth City,
Essays from the Prison in America. But Dorian, thank you
(33:05):
so much for joining us today. Of course, of course,
thank you. Okay, So Mango, you were really lifting my
spirits talking about the Los Collinas Detention and re Entry Facility,
(33:28):
And I like it because it seems to adopt the
same humane approach to incarceration that we saw in those
Norwegian jails, and it's really just cool to see that
way of thinking taking root in the American prison system. Yeah, definitely.
Instead of the typically like stark and alienating environments we
associate with prisons, these are more like tight knit communities,
almost like a college campus or a small village, and
(33:50):
that ends up feeling way healthier than just a people warehouse. Well.
Building a sense of community and purpose is actually a
common thread that I noticed in lots of prison programs
that aim for rehab and reintegration. And one of my
favorites is a program organized by a nonprofit called Hudson
Link for Higher Education in Prison. So in this program
that they allow inmates to enroll in college courses that
(34:12):
count toward a degree once they've been released. So for
the last nineteen years, the group has partnered with eight colleges,
one of them being Columbia University, to offer classes two
inmates at six different correctional facilities. So the program's aim
is to increase the chance of employment upon release and
reduce recidivism, and so far it seems to be working.
I mean, release prisoners who have taken classes offer through
(34:34):
Hudson Link have a recidivism rate of less than two percent.
That's unbelievable. So what kind of stuff are they studying.
It's a little bit of everything, really. I Mean one
of the courses from last year was a literature humanities class,
so they read and discussed ideas from ancient authors like
Homer and Virgil, which sounds heavy, but uh, how's that
help in the real world. I mean I feel like
(34:56):
a college parent talking right now, right exactly. Well, you know,
just like any liberal art student will tell you. You know,
studying classics helps develop critical thinking skills, and so you
don't learn just how to read well or write well
or speak well. You learn how to think well too,
and and that can be useful for people who are
interested in, you know, better life choices. But according to
the course instructor, professor Laura kol Kowski, there's also another
(35:19):
benefit to engaging with these books. She says it can
help students gain more confidence, so they feel more comfortable
taking part in other debates once they're released. As she
puts it, there's really a deep value for them to
feel like, yeah, I can read this stuff and talk
about it. I'm part of a civil society and can
be part of a larger conversation. Yeah. I can definitely
see that, and and I'm definitely for any program that
(35:40):
helps prisoners find their voice. Again, speaking of it, have
you been listening to Your Hustle? Oh? I haven't. I'm
actually so glad you brought it up, because I was
going to if you didn't. Yeah, So, for any listeners
who haven't checked it out yet, Your Hustle is this
bi weekly podcast about life inside San Quentin State Prison.
And that's interesting enough right there. But the really cool
thing is that it's created and recorded and also produced
(36:02):
by two current inmates and this volunteer local artist, all
in the very limited free time they have every week,
and one of the inmates or long Woods co hosts,
and this other guy, Anton Williams, handles all the show's
sound design. It's all done through a keyboard bar from
the Prisons Media Lab. It's pretty awesome, and it reminds
you that these are human beings. We're talking about. Yeah,
(36:22):
it is amazing, And your hustle is full of interviews
with different prisoners on all sorts of topics. So they'll
cover things like justice and regret and love and race
and isolation, but also more mundane things like you know,
food and pets and disagreements with cellmates. It's definitely worth
a lessen. Yeah, but but it's also just like this
great example of what a program that invests in prisoners
(36:43):
as people can lead to. Yeah, you know, And because
we're talking about the importance of giving prisoners a voice,
I want to share Wood's own take on what he
considers the aim of the podcast. So he writes, I
want the listeners to be able to relate to the
struggles that we go through on a day to day
basis and not get caught up in the US versus
them mentality. We're all the same. Some of us just
(37:05):
took different routes and needed a time out and a
little rehabilitation to get back to responsible behavior. So I know,
we started by acknowledging that fixing the entire prison system
is beyond the scope of our forty five minute podcast.
But wait, are you about to tell us how to
fix the entire prison system. Yeah, definitely not. And I
know I'm at risk of sounding like a p s
A here, but I would encourage anyone who's heard anything
(37:27):
on today's show that surprised them to do your own
research and even let your congressman or women know about
anything you find you don't like. It might sound silly
or Pollyanna, but just raising awareness about problems in the
prison system can really help make those two plus million
citizens who are part of it feel a little less invisible. Yeah,
I think you're right, Mango. I mean, it's definitely a start,
(37:48):
but um, you know, I don't want you to think
that your p s A announcement will win you any
sympathy in today's fact off, just to be clear about that.
So I gotta kick this off with one person who
definitely doesn't seem to have been rehabilitated. Courts reported that
(38:10):
in prison Bernie made Off, who scammed America out of
so much money, used as economic savvy to corner the
hot chocolate market and then sell it into prison yard
at high margin. Friendly Anyone who wanted some of that
sweet Swissmas needed to go through Uncle Bernie to get
a taste. He clearly feels a lot of regret for
what he's done. That's crazy, all right. Well, here's the
(38:32):
fact I found surprising about a Spanish prison called r
O S, which is notable for having cells for families.
But normally, if an inmate has a baby, the child
is sent to foster care to live with relatives. But
here the child is allowed to stay with their parents
until they're three years old. The children have toys and
other kids to play with, and the bonding is supposed
(38:53):
to not only help the child but give the parents
something to look forward to after their sentences served. So
this one totally baffled me. But have you heard that
prison authorities in Abu Dhabi are planning a jail where
inmates could serve their sentences without ever meeting a prison guard.
So how does that work? So instead of interacting with guards,
this humane prison has people communicating with quote social workers, trainers, psychologists, counselors,
(39:18):
and medical staff and they continue uh quote. Security guards
will be available behind the scenes, but asked to intervene
only when necessary. Definitely curious to see how that works.
All right. Here here's what I found curious about the
Civil War prison camp in Elmira, New York. Apparently the
prison camp had two observation towers for visitors where they
had concession stands selling peanuts, lemonade, and cakes, all while
(39:41):
you watched people suffering below. That's so gross. Also, it's
a little different than the Philippines prisons where they charge
visitors to watch them dance to thriller in Greece, I
mean that's to make money for the facilities. But speaking
of entertainment, did you know that the opening song of
the Coen Brothers movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Was
actually an old track from nine recorded by prisoners. The
(40:03):
most amazing part is that forty years later, the Coen
Brothers actually tracked down one of the prisoners, this guy
named James Carter, and paid him royalties. Oh that's perfect.
I've actually got one about a different James Carter. And
this is an incredible story I read in the New
York Times about Jimmy Carter. Apparently, this woman, Mary Prince,
who had been convicted of murder, was assigned to work
at the Governor's mansion and a work release program when
(40:25):
he was there, and after Carter spent time with her,
he became so convinced that she was innocent, that he
applied to be her parole officer. Also he could take
her to the White House to be his daughter's nanny.
Prince was eventually pardoned, but it's kind of an unbelievable story.
Oh I like that one. And ending this on a
hopeful note. So you in today's trophy, and that's it
(40:45):
for today's Part Time Genius. As always, if you've got
comments or feedback, please don't hesitate to write us at
part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com or
hit us up on our seven fact hotline four four
pt Genius. So that's eve it is, thanks again for listening.
(41:15):
Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works
and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. CHRISTA
McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme
song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland
does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher,
with support from the research army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams, and even Jeff Cook gets the
(41:37):
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Do we do we forget Jason?
Jason who
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!