Credit: Brennan Center for Justice: Lauren-Brooke Eisen
Insights from joining correctional leaders, policymakers, and advocates on trips to Germany and Norway to learn about more humane models of criminal justice.
Northern Europe’s dignity-first approach to incarceration offers inspiration and practical support for initiatives in the United States to incorporate new approaches to corrections. It is also instructive because these practices may help reduce recidivism and help safely reduce the number of people in our overcrowded prisons and jails. While these approaches and practices are not a panacea to the American crisis in corrections, core principles focused on reducing harm are starting to take hold in the United States.
Late last year, the Brennan Center joined correctional staff and leaders, other advocacy organizations, academics, practitioners, and policymakers on two trips to Norway and Germany to learn more about the countries’ laws and philosophies on criminal justice policy and imprisonment. Amend, an organization at the University of California, San Francisco, organized the September immersion program in Norway to inspire a change in practices in U.S. prisons. The next month, an American delegation visited Berlin to facilitate ambitious criminal legal reform in the United States by learning about the German system. The Vera Institute of Justice organized that trip. The experiences shed light on the two countries’ commitment to the human rights and dignity of those accused or convicted of committing crimes.
The focus on Northern Europe’s approach to prisons is not new. Over the last two decades, U.S. correctional leaders and staff, advocates, government officials, researchers, and policymakers have traveled there to learn about different correctional philosophies and how they could influence positive changes in the U.S. justice system. Those visits spurred prison reform in states as diverse as California, Michigan, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington.
Projects in the United States inspired by these trips include Vera’s Restoring Promise Initiative, which creates housing units grounded in dignity for young adults in prison; Little Scandinavia, a pilot program at a Pennsylvania prison to implement select Scandinavian correctional practices; and the Washington Way, a state-wide partnership with Amend to overhaul prison policies and practices to center dignity and health of correctional staff and people who are incarcerated. They were also the basis for Amend’s work in multiple states, including California, North Dakota, and Oregon, to help transform U.S. prisons to be safer. The trips have also inspired groups like One Voice, an organization that convenes front-line staff and correctional union leaders, which advocates to reduce prison harm for staff and those who are incarcerated. Arnold Ventures is supporting research to evaluate the effects of some of these programs on prison violence and recidivism.
Germany and Norway came to their correctional philosophies in different ways.
World War II influenced how Germany’s legal system treats citizens. The first article of Germany’s post-World War II constitution declares that “human dignity is inviolable” and the state is obligated to protect it for everyone, including people in prison. German correctional officers visit World War II concentration camps to learn about Nazi atrocities to better understand the great risk of abusing power.
Norway’s switch to a more humane system of imprisonment came about as a proactive decision in the 1990s after a government commission studied the roots of pervasive prison violence and poor post-release outcomes.
Key Aspects of Corrections in Germany and Norway
Normalization
In both countries, a consistent philosophy is that prisons should minimize the inherently damaging effects of institutionalization. This translates into prison life resembling life on the outside as much and as safely as possible. In both countries, we saw that almost all incarcerated people had their own cells and bathrooms, some even with private showers, including in a maximum-security prison. In Norway, we spent time at an open-air prison on an island where men live in houses without correctional staff. At evening count, correctional officers walk to the houses, socialize with residents by joining them for coffee, and then leave. Many of the men bike around the island or take a public ferry to a city on the mainland to go to work or to take classes.
Professionalization of Corrections
Both Germany and Norway invest enormous resources in training correctional staff. In Norway, all correctional officers receive at least two years of paid training split between the Norwegian Correctional Academy and practical training in prisons. They also receive a bachelor’s degree upon completion. We visited the academy and spent time with students who were studying law, psychology, ethics, criminology, and de-escalation techniques.
In Germany, future correctional officers spend 18 to 24 months learning about the role, earning a salary during that time. They study relevant laws and take ethics and social science classes. In contrast, U.S. correctional officers get very little training, in some states receiving only six weeks.
Dynamic Security
One of the most important aspects of the prison systems visited — and most subtle — is their unwavering commitment to a philosophy known as “dynamic security,” which focuses on investing in human relationships as key to safety and security. In practice, this translates into an officer asking an incarcerated person about their day, sharing a meal with them, or simply shaking their hand. While many correctional staff in the United States know how to practice dynamic security, it’s only recently become more common in American correctional trainings but is still very limited. Typically, anti-fraternization policies have precluded dynamic security from becoming a practiced norm in the United States.
Import Model
Norway practices the “import model,” an approach that many correctional officers in Norway proudly admit they “stole” from Sweden. Under this model, the government agencies responsible for providing critical services to the public, including health, education, and public library access, are responsible for providing the same services inside of prisons, ensuring better continuity upon release from prison. For example, prison libraries are stocked with the same books and videos as community libraries.
This model ensures that services such as education and healthcare are provided within facilities by local and municipal providers the same way they do for those in the community. So in Norway, for example, the Ministry of Education is responsible for education inside prisons, not the correctional service. Access to education is not reliant on the existence of volunteers who happen to start a program in a particular prison.
Paths to Improving American Prisons
The media often portrays Norway and Germany as the gold standard of correctional practice, but officials in both countries spoke about their own challenges and continual drive to improve. They want to increase visitation, for example, which can be much less frequent than in the United States. The incarcerated people we met on the visits did not have access to tablets to easily access email or entertainment as they do in many U.S. prisons. And some people incarcerated in Norwegian and German prisons spoke about their lack of access to outdoor spaces and significant time spent in their cells.
Trips to other countries to study their justice systems are instructive, but they must be viewed with an understanding of differences with the United States. Germany and Norway’s respective prison populations are approximately 58,000 and 3,000, compared with nearly 2 million in the United States. And Germany and Norway are social welfare states with comprehensive systems of healthcare coverage, basic income guarantees, and housing benefits among other government services, making the import system difficult to even partially implement in the United States.
Norwegian prisons are also facing critical staffing shortages — the number of prison officers fell by 15 percent between 2022 and 2024 — and American prisons are facing a significant correctional staff crisis as well. In the United States, the number of corrections officers has been falling for more than a decade. And in 2022, the state prison population increased 2.2 percent while the number of corrections officers declined by 12 percent.
While certain Northern European policies would not work in the United States, there are still a number that should be at least tried. And beyond individual policies, understanding different correctional practices and overall philosophies can have the valuable effect of spurring correctional leaders and staff to innovate and experiment.
In Norway, Amend founder Dr. Brie Williams spoke of the importance of showing correctional staff, leaders, and policymakers that “there’s a completely different way to do the work that they do — one that centers health, wellbeing, rehabilitation, and human dignity.” And Vera Institute President Nick Turner reminded us throughout our time in Germany that we need to persist in asking why we can’t change practices that don’t work for staff, those imprisoned, or the broader communities.
That question drives the Brennan Center to understand how to support efforts to implement more humane practices in American prisons. Later this year, we will release a report that details critical work taking place in the United States to greatly reduce violence and harm in prisons. Several of these initiatives have also increased staff retention and improved reentry outcomes. We seek to present a clear vision of what a more fair, humane, and effective justice system could look like. Improving the conditions and outcomes for people in prison is a goal shared across the political spectrum.
Apr 16, 2025
