From a Pennsylvania prison’s mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners to prisons in Tennessee offering inmates 30 days off their sentences in exchange for undergoing birth control procedures, the United States prison system has a demonstrated history of subjecting inmates to substandard conditions. With a criminal justice system that has touted the “tough on crime” mantra, U.S. prisons have largely failed to rehabilitate inmates and prepare them for re-entry into society.

The U.S. has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world with 76.6 percent of prisoners rearrested within five years of their release. At 20 percent, Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. In an effort to curb some of the issues within their state’s criminal justice system, prison officials in North Dakota took a page out of Norway’s book to make prisons more humane. Leann Bertsch, director of North Dakota’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and one of her deputies, Karianne Jackson, ventured to Norway’s Halden and Bastøy prisons in 2015 to study how the inmates are treated.

Halden Prison is a maximum-security facility about 60 miles south of Oslo, Norway’s capital. Yet Halden stands in stark contrast to the high-security prisons found in the U.S. Halden, which Time named “The World’s Most Humane Prison,” houses its prisoners in private rooms that look more like college dorm rooms than the stereotypical prison cell or common sleeping area. The prison is outfitted with colorful interior decor, athletic facilities, a recording studio, and outdoor trails and seating areas, according to Time.

The Halden and Bastøy prisons were both featured in Michael Moore’s 2015 documentary film “Where to Invade Next.” At Bastøy, prisoners dress in regular clothes, stay in private rooms with their own key, and even work in a kitchen which–as Moore points out–is equipped with sharp knives. Yet it’s this culture of compassion, trust, and humanity that keeps Bastøy running. And if you weren’t yet convinced that Halden is about as close to paradise as prisons get, its orientation video features the prison guards singing a rendition of “We Are The World.”

After returning from Norway, Bertsch and Jackson took the lessons they learned at Halden and Bastøy and began implementing them at North Dakota’s Missouri River Correctional Center, nicknamed “The Farm.” At The Farm, prisoners are now housed in communal rooms with eight to 16 men, according to Mother Jones. They’re not the “interior design magazine” level of stylish that Bertsch and Jackson visited in the Norway prisons, but they’re certainly an improvement on traditional prison sleeping quarters. Plus, if an inmate is close to his release date and has proven good behavior, he can obtain a private room which shares a bathroom with only one other room.

Before Bertsch and Jackson’s trip, the state penitentiary’s administrative segregation unit was rampant with rules that placed prisoners in solitary confinement instead of addressing their behavior in a constructive manner. Now, only inmates who endanger somebody will end up in solitary, and the maximum time they can be held there has been shortened. Prisoners who have been isolated for long periods of time undergo behavioral therapy before they re-join the general prison population, giving them time to acclimate, according to Mother Jones. Another change was an effort to foster stronger relationships among guards and prisoners. Guards in the segregation unit are required to have at least two conversations with each inmate under their supervision per shift. Prisoners gather in sweat lodges and play handball outside on the court to build their relationships with one another, and seek on-site and off-site jobs to further their employment prospects once they are released.

If North Dakota, as a red state, can start taking steps to reform its prison system in a way that is actually beneficial to its inmates, then surely the rest of the country can too, right? Well, it might not be so easy. Shortly after being confirmed as Attorney General, Jeff Sessions doubled down on the use of private prisons despite several officials’ statements that private prisons put profits before the lives of inmates.

Likewise, the U.S. prison system has become increasingly overcrowded which is, in part, the result of convictions for nonviolent drug offenders instead of providing those individuals with treatment. That “tough on drugs” stance is likely to continue under Sessions. Sessions praised the anti-drug campaign Drug Abuse Resistance Education, more often referred to as DARE, at a DARE training conference in Texas on July 11, despite an abundance of research that has shown the program has been ineffective and may have even had a negative impact on substance abuse.

Providing substance abuse treatment instead of prison sentences to drug offenders would be in line with similar programs in Norway and could be a step toward reducing prison overcrowding, but it’s certainly not a magic bullet. The U.S. prison system also needs to focus on ways of rehabilitating violent offenders, reducing exorbitant sentences, and address the racial biases within the criminal justice system that disproportionately and negatively impact people of color.

Marcus Dieterle

Marcus is an editorial intern at Law Street. He is a rising senior at Towson University where he is double majoring in mass communication (with a concentration in journalism and new media) and political science. When he isn’t in the newsroom, you can probably find him reading on the train, practicing his Portuguese, or eating too much pasta. Contact Marcus at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Here in the United States we imprison a lot of people. Often we imprison them for a long time, and doing so obviously costs taxpayers a lot of money. So, for a long time, there’s been a conversation in this country over whether it’s productive to lock people up so much. Well, now prisons are trying to answer those questions themselves by using psychological assessments to determine whether or not it’s safe to release prisoners.

In an investigative report, Associated Press reporters found that for years, states have been using secretive psychological examinations to try to determine recidivism rates, in an attempt to figure out which prisoners should be released. The tests can also be used to help determine how the prisoner will be treated in prison.

These examinations vary from state to state, but most include a long series of questions about things like family background, education, income, and history. Each answer is given a score, although it’s unclear exactly what the parameters for scoring are. Then, those scores are tallied, and the assessment is used for a variety of things. If this seems vague, that’s because, well, it is very vague. Not only do these evaluations differ from state to state, but sometimes they differ within the state or jurisdiction. They don’t necessarily weight answers the same way–an offender could score differently on different tests, which is exactly what happened to Milton Thomas, an Arkansas inmate. But, most importantly, they’re basically kept secret. Some states never release the results.

There are also a lot of questions over whether the assessments are actually reliable. They do rely heavily on the offenders’ answers to the questions. If an inmate is lying, or does not remember something correctly, his scores could be different. Prisons don’t always check out the answers to make sure that they’re correct.

Furthermore, there are concerns that the tests unfairly discriminate against those offenders who come from lower income backgrounds or have attained lower levels of education than their peers.

There have, unsurprisingly, been incidents where the test results were “wrong,” and someone who was released because of his score ended up committing a new crime. One of the more prominent ones was Darren Vann, a sex offender released in Texas. His assessment labeled him as “low risk to reoffend,” but then a year later he confessed to killing seven women.

There have been some moves to reform these surveys. The Justice Department has been aiding and funding states in developing policies and tests; however, the tests aren’t currently used at the federal level, and there have been statements made by Attorney General Eric Holder that indicate that the use of such tests stands counter to DOJ policies. In August he stated,

Criminal sentences must be based on the facts, the law, the actual crimes committed, the circumstances surrounding each individual case, and the defendant’s history of criminal conduct. They should not be based on unchangeable factors that a person cannot control, or on the possibility of a future crime that has not taken place.

It’s definitely a good thing that prisons are trying to determine whether or not it makes sense to keep prisoners in for longer–we really do incarcerate a scarily large chunk of the population. That being said, there are clearly some big issues with the tests being used, and the total lack of transparency may mean there are even more issues that we don’t even know about yet. These tests may be a step in the right direction, but that doesn’t make them the right step.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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