Five years ago, I walked through the front gates of Halden Prison in southeastern Norway and genuinely believed I had arrived at the wrong address. There were no razor-wire fences. No guard towers with armed sentries. The building looked more like a Scandinavian design hotel than a maximum-security correctional facility. Inmates were jogging on a wooded trail. A man convicted of murder was grilling salmon on an outdoor barbecue.
I stood there with my notebook and thought: either everything I know about incarceration is wrong, or these people have lost their minds.
After five years of research across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland -- visiting twenty-three facilities, interviewing over three hundred inmates and staff, and poring through decades of recidivism data -- I can tell you the answer. It's the first one. Almost everything America believes about punishment, deterrence, and public safety is contradicted by the evidence.
The Halden Model: What Maximum Security Actually Looks Like
Halden Prison holds roughly 250 inmates, many serving sentences for violent crimes including murder, sexual assault, and armed robbery. The facility cost about $250 million to build, and every design decision was intentional.
Inmates live in private rooms with flatscreen TVs, mini-fridges, and windows that let in natural light. There are no bars. The walls are decorated with commissioned art -- the Norwegian government spent roughly $1 million on artwork alone, believing that aesthetic environment directly affects psychological wellbeing and rehabilitation outcomes.
Guards carry no weapons. They eat meals with inmates. They play sports together, participate in music programs together, and address each other by first names. The ratio is roughly one guard for every two inmates -- in American prisons, it's often one guard for every fifty or more.
When I first described this to American corrections officers, the most common response was laughter. The second most common was anger. "You want to reward criminals?" one warden in Texas asked me. "That's not justice. That's a vacation."
But here's what the Texas warden didn't mention: his facility had a five-year recidivism rate of 67 percent. Halden's is 20 percent. Norway's national rate hovers around 20 percent. America's national rate is 76.6 percent within five years of release.
Let me say that again. More than three out of four people released from American prisons are rearrested within five years. In Norway, it's roughly one in five.
If your goal is punishment, the American system delivers. If your goal is public safety -- fewer future victims, fewer future crimes -- the data is not ambiguous. It is devastating.
The Philosophy Gap
The fundamental difference between Scandinavian and American corrections is not money or architecture. It is philosophy.
In Norway, the principle of "normality" governs prison design. The idea is simple: life inside prison should resemble life outside prison as closely as possible, because the overwhelming majority of inmates will eventually return to society. If you spend years in a dehumanizing environment of violence and deprivation, you will return to society dehumanized and violent. If you spend years learning job skills, practicing social interaction, and being treated as a person capable of change, you have a meaningful chance of becoming that person.
American corrections, by contrast, operates primarily on a retributive model. The purpose of prison is punishment. Suffering is the point. Conditions are deliberately harsh because comfort is seen as a reward, and rewards are seen as undeserved.
The problem is that retribution and public safety are often in direct conflict. Making someone's life miserable for five or ten or twenty years does not produce a well-adjusted citizen. It produces a traumatized, angry, socially isolated person with no job skills and a criminal record that will follow them forever. And then we act surprised when they reoffend.
I interviewed a former inmate at Halden named Erik who had served eight years for aggravated assault. During his sentence, he completed a bachelor's degree in computer science, worked in the prison's recording studio, and participated in a restorative justice program where he met his victim's family. When he was released, he had a job lined up, an apartment secured through a reentry program, and a support network.
"The hardest part of prison was still being in prison," Erik told me. "Don't let anyone tell you Norwegian prisons are easy. Losing your freedom is losing your freedom. But they didn't try to destroy me on top of it. They gave me a chance to figure out who I could be instead of who I had been."
Contrast this with the American inmates I've interviewed over the years. A man in a Louisiana facility told me he spent three years in solitary confinement -- twenty-three hours a day in a concrete cell smaller than a parking space. When he was released to general population, he could barely hold a conversation. When he was released from prison entirely, he lasted four months before being rearrested.
"They broke something in me in that hole," he said. "I went in angry and came out empty. I don't think empty people make good decisions."
The Numbers That Should End the Debate
Let me lay out the comparative data as plainly as I can.
Recidivism rates (rearrested within five years of release):
- United States: 76.6%
- Norway: 20%
- Sweden: 29%
- Denmark: 27%
- Finland: 31%
Incarceration rates (per 100,000 population):
- United States: 531
- Norway: 54
- Sweden: 68
- Denmark: 72
- Finland: 50
Cost per inmate per year:
- United States (average): $35,000-$60,000 (varies wildly by state; some exceed $100,000)
- Norway: approximately $129,000
That last number is the one that makes American policymakers choke. Norway spends more than twice as much per inmate as most US states. But here is the calculation they never do: factor in the cost of re-incarceration.
When 76.6 percent of your released inmates return to prison, you are paying for them again. And again. Each cycle costs the state arrest, prosecution, court time, public defense, incarceration, and the economic loss of a non-contributing citizen. The RAND Corporation estimated that the lifetime cost of a single chronic offender to the US criminal justice system exceeds $1.5 million.
Norway pays more upfront. America pays more forever.
A 2019 analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice found that the true cost of incarceration in the United States -- including policing, courts, lost wages, and social services for affected families -- exceeds $182 billion annually. That figure does not include the generational cost: children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to be incarcerated themselves.
We are not saving money. We are financing a self-perpetuating cycle and calling it fiscal responsibility.
What I Saw That Changed My Mind
I want to be transparent about my own evolution. When I began this research, I was skeptical of the Scandinavian model. I grew up in Boston. I had the same instincts most Americans have: crime deserves punishment, and soft prisons produce soft consequences.
Three moments changed my thinking.
The first was watching a guard at Halden sit down with an inmate who had received bad news about a custody hearing. The guard spent forty-five minutes talking with him, not as an authority figure, but as a human being. In the American facilities I'd visited, that interaction would have been a thirty-second "return to your cell." The inmate later told me that conversation kept him from a violent outburst that would have added years to his sentence.
The second was visiting Bastoy Prison, a minimum-security island facility in Norway where inmates live in wooden cottages, farm the land, and manage their own daily schedules. Bastoy has a recidivism rate of 16 percent -- the lowest in Europe. The warden told me something I've never forgotten: "Every human being is more than the worst thing they have ever done. If you treat people like animals, they will act like animals. If you treat them like people who made a terrible choice, some of them -- many of them -- will make better choices."
The third was returning to an American maximum-security facility after six months in Scandinavia. The noise hit me first -- constant yelling, metal clanging, overhead announcements. Then the smell: industrial disinfectant failing to mask sweat and despair. I watched a corrections officer scream at an inmate for walking too slowly. I saw a man in a wheelchair unable to access the yard. I stood in a housing unit with 120 men in a space designed for 80.
I had normalized this. We all have. And that normalization is the biggest obstacle to reform.
What American States Are Starting to Do
The good news is that the evidence is beginning to penetrate. Several US states have started pilot programs inspired by Scandinavian principles.
North Dakota sent corrections officials to Norway in 2015 and subsequently redesigned its facilities and training programs. The state reduced solitary confinement by 75 percent, implemented shared dining between staff and inmates, and introduced extensive vocational programming. Early results showed a measurable decline in violence and disciplinary incidents.
Oregon launched the "Scandinavian Prison Project" in partnership with the Vera Institute, rethinking facility design and staff training. Connecticut, California, and Washington have sent delegations to Norway and begun implementing elements of the normality principle.
Colorado abolished long-term solitary confinement in 2017 and invested in cognitive-behavioral programming. The state's recidivism rate has dropped from the national average to roughly 50 percent -- still far above Scandinavian levels, but a significant improvement.
These are small steps, and they face enormous political headwinds. The "tough on crime" narrative remains powerful in American politics because it speaks to legitimate fear and legitimate anger. Victims of violent crime deserve justice, and I have never met a Scandinavian corrections official who would disagree with that.
But justice and vengeance are not the same thing. And a system that produces more victims by cycling traumatized people back into communities is not delivering justice. It is delivering the opposite.
The Question We Need to Answer
After five years of research, the question I keep coming back to is not whether the Scandinavian model works. The data answers that unambiguously. The question is whether Americans are willing to separate their desire for punishment from their desire for safety.
Because right now, we are choosing punishment. And the cost of that choice is measured in the 76.6 percent of released inmates who will offend again, in the communities that will absorb that violence, in the children who will grow up visiting their parents through plexiglass, and in the billions of dollars we will spend perpetuating a system that makes the problem worse.
I walked out of Halden Prison five years ago and the salmon was still grilling. A guard waved at me. An inmate nodded. The sun was setting behind the Norwegian trees and for a moment it looked like any other Thursday evening in any other place.
That is the point. That is the entire point. These are people who will one day live next door to someone. The question is what kind of neighbor you want them to be.
Connor Gallagher is a criminal justice researcher and prison reform advocate. He has visited correctional facilities in fourteen countries and has consulted for state-level reform initiatives in North Dakota, Oregon, and Colorado. He holds a master's degree in criminology from Northeastern University and is based in Boston.