What can we learn from the world's "most humane" prison? | Ryan Cox | TEDxSanAntonio 2013

hi in this country especially here in Texas we like to think that freedom is an important value to us but what so what you may be surprised to know is that one in 30 people in this country are currently under supervision by the criminal justice system that means that if this room represented Texas we'd have one lawyer sitting over here one doctor sitting over there but then we'd have six of you currently incarcerated we'd have another twenty of you under supervision on either probation or parole and seventy five more of you would eventually encounter the criminal justice system if we take a look at the trend of how our prison population has grown over time it's really a unbelievably shocking trend in the 1980s there were less than half a million prisoners in this country and fast forward 30 years there's over 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the United States 2.3 million that makes us the largest jailer in the entire world and those numbers don't include the 8 million people that are currently on probation and parole so how does this compare internationally if you take a look at this graph you can see that no one else comes close to us not only do we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the world but we also incarcerate people at a higher rate than anyone else in the world and Texas specifically we incarcerate people at twice the rate of Russia and almost four times the rate of most other countries we've considered to be authoritarian like China Iran and Saudi Arabia so the question is how do we get to this point now you've heard some that we have a huge mental health problem in this country that fills our prisons full of people that need treatment you can we can also look at the war on drugs we can look at the proliferation of statutory crimes we can look at tougher sentencing but what I really want to focus on today is recidivism 2.3 million people in our prisons 60% of them when they are released from prison will return birria rested and would be reincarnated within five years of being released so that really begs the question why do we fail at rehabilitation our prisons are not preparing people for reintegration into society so really I want to give you three real reason to think about why we are so terrible at rehabilitation the first reason is that our prisons are are dehumanizing not only do we take someone lock them away in a concrete box surround it with surround it with fences and barbed wire but then we also tell them that they are a criminal we tell them that they're a bad person that they're a deviant that that they are not as good as other people when that happens people begin to not care what it is that they're doing in the outside world they consider themselves to be criminal because they've been told they are for so long the second reason that we fail a rehabilitation is our draconian sentencing laws we sentence people two decades in prison on a very regular basis whereas in the rest of the world well at least South America and certain parts of Europe have adopted a 21 year maximum sentence for almost any for almost any crime the reason they've done that is because the data shows again and again that deterrence is not affected by the length of a sentence after a certain threshold which means a five-year sentence for a specific crime doesn't deter anyone any more than maybe a two-year sentence does for that crime we sentenced people two more years than anyone else in the world the third real reason that we fail a rehabilitation is the fact that that we don't prepare people for the for the outside world and what I mean by that is we don't give them any skills or training necessary and we set up institutional barriers for them once they do get out so there's when people are taken out of their communities and put into prison there's essentially no mental health treatment no drug treatment no no ability to obtain job skills that will help them in the outside world then when they do get out not only are they not allowed to vote to change the system they're also prevented from participating in government programs and jobs and they're required to spend their time and money reporting to supervisors with the ever looming threat of re-incarceration so the question is what can we do to solve these problems the answer is not to go on vacation like this guy because this guy's not on vacation this is a pupil in the prison in the bastoy prison island located about 200 miles south of oslo now notice that I said pupil and not prisoner the idea in Norway is that one we're going to create open prisons that mimic more of the outside world to decrease that stigma or decrease that dehumanizing aspects we're not going to call people bad people we're going to talk about they're about the bad choices that they've made and we're going to prepare them for reintegration into the outside world so before we ever talk about taking these kind of programs and putting them in the prisons that we have here in Texas we need to know if they work as I said before 60 percent of people that leave our prisons returned to them within five years Texas is a little bit better than that we're about fifty seven fifty five percent depending on the data you use Norway in these progressive prisons is at 18 percent that's a third of the recidivism rate which is an astonishingly low around the world so we know that these work we just don't know exactly which factors in which prisons are the best and which ones will work for us so we have to study them and try to realize what it is we can learn from these prisons and what we can how we could use that here so what we have here is a is a photo of a standard prison cell in Texas as you can see no windows double occupancy zero privacy completely dehumanizing second picture here is a prison cell in Norway which really looks a lot like my college dorm room when I first moved to Austin as you can see there's TV they have open window and privacy there no one else lives with them which is a great aspect to the way these prisons are designed not only that they're designed around these central common rooms so there's four or six prison cells that all feed into a central common room where people can live it similar to a small community and they can be grouped based on their career goals their rehabilitation goals if they have certain kinds of problems that one person can definitely help the other person with the prison can put them together in those small groups then we take a look at this other at this other slide we can see this is a photo of a prison yard in Texas as you can see there's absolutely zero regard for how the environment affects the behavior of people and and how it dehumanizes them and tells them that they're bad people if you look at this picture of part of the prison yard at the Halden high-security prison in Norway you can see that they use green spaces to try to take their surroundings and internalize that and come back out in a worse way than they ever were when they first came in and at the island prison that I showed you earlier they don't even have yards they don't have prison cells at all each of those people lives in a house that they have been assigned there they're in charge of taking care of that all of the maintenance and all of the landscaping for those houses as you can see in this picture they've taken all of the old prisons in Norway that used to be more like our traditional prisons and what they've done is turn them into complete mental health and drug rehabilitation programs so these are hospitals they've turned all the old prisons into hospitals and now they have these new open prisons that are amazing they use all kinds of green spaces to decrease the dehumanizing aspects they teach people skills like agriculture culinary arts fishing boating timber logging all kinds of livestock maintenance ground-up construction carpentry recreation at these prisons takes inmates and guards puts them together and has them essentially act as peers and mentors to one another so there's growth and not a feeling of oppression they have recording studios and and medical training facilities not only that they have a technology-based classrooms amazing amazing libraries and million multi-million dollar art installations that also kind of make them feel a little better the people who study these prisons they'll have a problem with this and they say America is not psychologically capable of letting institutions like this exist generally the objections are you know those guys don't deserve that or I don't even live that well or we should be spending our money in better ways but the answer or I mean the real truth about that is that we're already spending this money anyway right now in the United States we spend about a little less than forty thousand dollars per prisoner per year in the Norway in American dollars they spend about three times that but if you adjust that for the price cindex we only spend about 15 to 20 percent less per prisoner the Norway does for their great programs so the real issue is that we're already spending the money we should be getting a better return on our investment by reducing these recidivism rates thank you and hook em horns you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 122,442

Rating: 4.9062715 out of 5

Keywords: Most Humane Prison in the World, Norway, re-offending, criminals, guards, United States Of America (Country), arrest rates, tedx talks, Rian Cox, incarceration, San Antonio, tedx, recidivism, ted talks, Halden, Ryan Cox, TEDxSanAntonio, Norway High Security Prison, pupils, inmates, tedx talk, English Language (Human Language), prisoners, ted x, Halden prison, Texas, ted talk, ted, Texas Prisons, TEDx, prison, warden

Id: xeYkyjBbbNM

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2013