“It is quite relaxing to be here. We have bunnies and few sheep. Today, we are potting seedlings in preparation for a big spring sale” says Hannu Kallio. Hannu Kallio is not a farmer. He is a convicted drug smuggler at Kerava’s open prison in Finland. He isn’t locked. He doesn’t wear uniform. He works every day at a greenhouse, and earns about $8 an hour. He has a cell phone, does his grocery shopping in town and gets three days of vacation every couple of months. He pays a rent to the prison; and if he chooses to study for a university degree in town instead of working, he gets a subsidy for it. He sometimes takes supervised camping and fishing trips.
Being incarcerated in Finland wasn’t always a sinecure. In the 60’s, the country had one of the highest imprisonment rates in Europe. Prisons were overcrowded and detention conditions were deplorable. At the same period, researchers across Nordic countries started investigating how much punishment really helps reducing crime. They concluded that it doesn’t. As a consequence, Finland rethought all its penal policy. Fifteen years later, results were compelling. Finland have one of the lowest rates of imprisonment on the continent with 55 inmates for 100 000 inhabitant. As a comparison, the rate in the US in 2018 is 655 prisoners per 100 000 inhabitant. Prisoners in Finland are gradually reintroduced into normal life through open prisons. Almost third of Finnish inmates are housed in open prison, and inmates who go through open prisons are less likely to be arrested again.
Finland had it right. As you may already know, prison sentences serve several purposes. It removes criminal from the streets, it serves as a form of punishment, but it also helps to correct or modify the criminal behavior and prepares the offender for reintegration into society. “Conventional” prisons may have succeed in the two first goals, but have failed the last one. Research suggests that incarceration has a limited value in preventing future crime and it may contribute to increase the risk of recidivism (Griffiths & Cunningham, 2000). Although by changing the prison environment to match the needs of the offender, Finland obtains better outcomes. The recidivism rate for open prisons in Finland is 17% lower than in “conventional” prisons.
Some countries may not be ready to implement open prisons. The shift from an emphasis on punishment and a “get tough on crime” perspective (Benson, 2003) will be too strong to bear. An alternative could be to bring more humanity in prison setting through building therapeutic communities. A therapeutic community is a holistic residential environment that is designed to promote residents’ personal growth and development. The primary aim is to bring about changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that lead to a healthier and more adaptive lifestyle on return to the community than the lifestyle that lead the person to be admitted into the facility in the first place. The core concept is living-learning. The therapeutic community embodies principles like honesty, openness, self-governance, and learning from individuals’ effort to live together (Grant, 1980).
Extending the therapeutic community concept to the correctional setting may seem as first quite challenging. Some additional principles have to be included like building relationship with one another, attending to antisocial attitudes, values and beliefs, victim awareness, and developing strategies for avoiding reoffending (Lipton, 1998). Therapeutic communities can provide opportunities for offenders to live in a highly structured setting that models a cooperative prosocial environment. Living in a nurturing environment can change their attitudes witch will lead to change in their behaviors. Prison based therapeutic communities have been implemented in many states, like New York, California, Oregon and Texas.
Stay’n Out Program is an example of a prison based therapeutic community. It was developed in 1977 in New York. It is a 12-months program for male and female prisoners with substance abuse problems (Lipton, 1998). Participants are phased into the program over three stages: induction, treatment and consolidation of treatment and reentry into the community. The first stage involves orientation, assessment, and assimilation into the therapeutic community model. The second stage is aimed at personal growth. The final stage involves strengthening and reinforcing the treatment gains that have been made and developing a discharge plan. The Stay’n Out program worked pretty well. Participants recidivated less often and were less likely to violate their parole. Moreover, the longer the individuals participated in the program the better were the outcome.
Therapeutic communities and Open prisons show us that alternatives exist to the “Prison break” like incarcerate settings. One must not neglect the power of the situation in shaping peoples behaviors. Besides, countries can obtain great outcomes when, like in Finland, their policy are based on the work of experts and not only on politician hunches.
Bichell, R. (2015, April 15). In Finland’s ‘open prisons,’ inmates have the keys. Retrieved March 9, 2019, from https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-15/finlands-open-prisons-inmates-have-keys
Griffiths, C. T., & Cunningham, A. C. (2000). Canadian corrections. Scarborough, ON: Nelson.
Grant, J. D. (1980). From “living learning” to “learning to live”: An extension of social therapy. In H. Toch (Ed.), Therapeutic communities in corrections (pp. 41–49). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. (2012). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Los Angeles ; London ; New Dehli ; Singapore ; Washington DC ; Melbourne: SAGE.
Lipton, D. S. (1998). Therapeutic community: Treatment programming in corrections. Psychology, Crime and Law, 4, 213–263