Would you like to get away from the stresses of the daily life for the next five to ten years? Then Norway's new Halden prison/spa is for you!
[...]every cell comes with a private bathroom and a flat-screen TV, as well as a view--the windows don't even have bars in them. But what about facilities, you might ask? My college dorm had a foosball table, and a vending machine! This prison can't match that, right? Wrong. Halden has a gym, training room, chapel, library, family visiting unit, football (possibly soccer) field, a school, and, most unbelievably, a sound studio. But it's the design that's most strikingly different from American prisons. Halden doesn't shy away from bright, cheerful colors, and actually spent about $1 million to hire a graffiti artist named Dolk (sort of their version of Banksy) to paint beautiful murals all around the grounds.
Link | Photo Gallery | Photo: NRK
UPDATE: In the comments, Courageous Grace brings up a very good point. The prison opens on April 1. Is this a hoax?
Once you're a Norwegian however, you have so many things coming your way *by default* that you must be rather insane to commit a crime. As such, most Norwegian criminals are very much patients who only need a gentle nudge towards rehabilitation, as opposed to criminals elsewhere who choose a life of crime out of desperation. So there, now you know.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2008/11/norwegian-prisons.html
In America, we are so rooted in *Punishment* this would never fly, no matter the statistics...
I have very mixed feelings on this from my readings now.
While crime in the rest of Norway has been going down, it has been quite another situation in Oslo, where personal and automobile thefts increased markedly last year.There were 10,600 crimes reported in public places in 2007, up from 8,000 a year earlier, writes Norwegian daily newspaper Dagbladet.
Oslo had the highest rate per person in Scandinavia in terms of reported crimes, with 90 reported crimes per 1,000.
Copenhagen had 50 crimes reported per 1,000 and Stockholm had 79.
In New York, there were 22 reported crimes per 1,000 inhabitants.
This means there were four times as many reported crimes per person in Oslo as in New York.
The Oslo police are blaming the increase on an influx of East Europeans, and Minister of Justice Knut Storberget is reportedly partly in agreement.
However, Storberget said it is necessary to be careful drawing parallels with such statistics. “But regardless, we can say the crime figures in Oslo are too high,” he was reported to have said.
Jails need to be *effective* on the inside and thus employ the best methods known to rehabilitate even the most hardened criminal, regardless of whatever creature comforts need to provided.
Yet on the outside, in order to prevent crime, jails need to *seem* like a living hell to act as a deterrent.
THEREFORE, if someone/some system could somehow portray an image of total hell but SECRETLY be a high-tech therapy centre and somehow maintain that secrecy... it would probably be worth celebrating. But then... it might already have been done. We just don't know about it.
http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2009/03/5-star-prison-in-austria.html
Everyone don't believe in a "prison break-esque" kind of prison where its like a living hell.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/europe/091017/norway-open-prison
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4L6-0WRfSA&feature=related
@Bermuda: Well, you can't contribute luxury jails which is a relatively new invention to old statistics. Norway has a very liberal and extensive welfare program and is still a fairly congruent society as we've got oil riches to throw at the many servere challenges multiculturalism bring.