It’s A Hard Life!

Recently I have been discussing this article with my advanced level students and have gotten a lot of opinions on different angles.

Let me share it and get your opinions about it too.

It’s a summer day on Bastoey island, and Mange Ramstad is making the most of it. Lying on his back in his shorts, the 38-year-old Norwegian is sunbathing. Around him is lush woodland, brightly coloured houses and the sparkling waters of the Oslo fjord. Fora prsion, it’s an idyllic environment.
“This place is unbelievable,”says Ramstad, who is serving a six-year sentence for drug smuggling. “At the prison I was at before this one, we were locked up in our cells 23 hours a day.”
On the one-squre-mile island, the 115 inmates, who include murderers and fraudsters, enjoy activities not usually associated with jail. In summer they can improve their tennis, ride a horse in the forest and hit the beach for a swim. In winter they can go cross-country skiing.
But first the inhabitants must work. As the island is a farm, there are cattle to tend and organic crops to grow. Prisoners have access to tools such as axes, knives and saws; they cut trees into timber and restore the wooden houses dotted around the island.
Afterwards, residents return to comfortable houses shared between four and sic people. As Bastoey is an open prison, family members can come at the weekends; the island is accessbile via a short twice-daily ferry ride. Inmates can also leave Bastoey to stay with relatives.
All convicts must begin theri sentences in a traiditonal, closed prison, from where they apply to live a t Bastoey. The prison selects individuals on the basis of whether they want to turn their lives around.
Bastoey is based on the idea that traditional, repressive prisons do not work. “The biggest mistake that our societies have made is to believe that you must punish hard to change prisoners,” explains Bastoey’s governor, Oeyvind Alnaes. “But the big closed prisons are criminal schools. If you treat people badly, they will behave badly. anyone can be a citizen if we treat them well, respect them and give them challenges.”
Bastoey’s philosophy is that individuals will stop their criminal behaviour if they develop a sense of responsibility. The way to achieve that is to take care of the nature around them; in the stables, for instance, eahc person is responsible for a horse or a cow.
“Ecology is a great tool,’ adds Alnaes, “because it shows that what we do has an impact on the future. Criminals often do not think before acting.”
The staff at Bastoey also run courses designed to challenge behaviour and force them to confront what they have done. Security is deliberately kept low, so there are fewer employees, which makes the prison cheaper to run than a closed one.
What sets Bastoey apart from other open prisons is its emphasis on ecology as a tool for rehabilitation, and some campaigners would welcome more like it. “This innovative Norwegian model promotes what most criminal justice reformers know to work – a requirement that offenders take responsibility for their lives and work hard to pay for what they’ve done, in an environment that is small-scale and rom which family contact can be maintained.”