Norway also operates open prisons, some on islands where there is a lot of farm work and contact with nature. The most famous is on the island of Bastoey, “which is very beautifully located in the Oslo Fjord,” Mjaland said.
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Even Anders Behring Breivik – who killed eight people in the 2011 bombing of a government building in Oslo, then gunned down 69 more at a holiday camp for left-leaning youth activists n– has a dining room, fitness room and TV room with an Xbox. His cell wall is decorated with a poster of the Eiffel Tower and parakeets share his space.
The idea of creating normal, humane conditions for people in prison is starting to spread in the US as well.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for example, has in recent years been trying to apply certain elements of the Nordic approach, and unveiled a program it calls “Little Scandinavia” in a prison in Chester in 2022.
The Menendez brothers’ case was again in the public spotlight on Thursday when the Los Angeles County district attorney recommended that their life-without-parole sentences be thrown out. Prosecutors hope a judge will resentence the brothers so they can be eligible for parole.
If the judge agrees, a parole board must then approve the brothers’ release. The final decision rests with the California governor.
Lyle (left) and Erik Menendez with defence attorney Leslie Abramson in Beverly Hills Municipal Court in 1990.Credit: AP
The Menendez brothers’ lawyer and the LA district attorney argued that the pair have served enough time, citing evidence that they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their entertainment executive father.
They also say the brothers, now in their 50s, are model prisoners who have committed themselves to rehabilitation and redemption.
Both point to the brothers’ years of efforts to improve the San Diego prison where they have lived for six years. Before that, the two had been held in separate prisons since 1996.
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In 2018, Lyle Menendez launched the beautification program, Green Space, at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. His brother, Erik, is the lead painter for a massive mural that depicts San Diego landmarks.
“This project hopes to normalise the environment inside the prison to reflect the living environment outside the prison,” Pedro Calderon Michel, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told AP.
The Menendez brothers’ work is ongoing, with the ultimate goal of transforming the prison yard “from an oppressive concrete and gravel slab into a normalised park-like campus setting surrounded by a majestic landscape mural”, according to the project’s website.
The final product will include outdoor classrooms, rehabilitation group meeting spaces and training areas for service dogs.
The prison system recently launched the “California model” in the hopes of starting similar projects across the state to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education and re-entry”, Calderon Michel said.
One of the interiors at Halden Prison in Norway that offers a model of rehabilitative design. Credit: Erik Møller Arkitekter
The brothers’ lawyer, Mark Geragos, said he believed Lyle Menendez learnt about the Norwegian model during his university classes.
Lyle Menendez is currently enrolled in a master’s program and has studied urban planning and recidivism, and Geragos said his client hoped the beautification would make reintroduction into society easier for people who are paroled.
“When you’re there in a grey space that is not very welcoming, it’s disorienting to some degree,” Geragos said.
“And also you have the issue that the terrain is not something that’s welcoming or helpful in terms of being acclimated and being re-acclimated into a community.”
Dominique Moran, a professor at the University of Birmingham, said she found in her research that introducing green spaces in prisons improved the wellbeing of prisoners as well as correctional staff.
“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence, and also reduces staff sickness,” said Moran, author of Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration.
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Moran has studied prisons around the world, and said in a statement that in the Scandinavian approach, “people go to prison AS punishment, not FOR further punishment”.
“The deprivation of liberty is itself the punishment,” she said. “There should not be further punishment through the nature of the environment in which people are held.”
AP
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