Inmates work in the kitchen at Tegel Prison in Berlin. US states of all political stripes, including Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Massachusetts, have sent officials to tour prisons in Germany in search of ways to improve conditions for American inmates. Photo / Lena Mucha, the New York Times
It was a lovely spring day in Berlin when a tour bus pulled up outside a maximum-security prison called Tegel. Cobblestones, bike racks and blooming azaleas gave it the air of a college campus.
What Shannon Davison, a deputy prison warden from North Dakota, noticed were security threats.
Davison, part of a delegation of United States prison officials who were there to learn about Germany’s system, clocked them in seconds.
Inmates working outside the gate. Guards using vape pens, potentially a valuable commodity. Broom handles, a cart with metal wheels, and cell windows that opened.
There were other things you simply would not see in an American prison, like a warden casually placing a giant ring of keys on the floor beside her chair.
“They treat their maximum-security prisoners like minimum-security prisoners,” Davison marvelled.
And yet, Tegel Prison is far less violent than many American prisons.
Over the course of a week, officials from Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Oklahoma toured four German prisons where inmates wore street clothes, maintained their right to vote, cooked their own meals, played in soccer leagues, and learned skills like animal husbandry and carpentry.
One, called the Open Prison, allowed residents to come and go for work, school, and errands.
A growing number of American states are looking abroad for ideas that can be adapted to their state prison systems, most often to Scandinavian countries famous for the IKEA-utopia design of their correctional institutions, but also to places like Germany and New Zealand.
In the past two years, California, Arizona, and Oklahoma’s prison systems have shifted their focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment.
In 2022, Pennsylvania opened a unit known as Little Scandinavia, and last year Missouri began a similar transformation project in four prisons. Six other states have established European-style units for younger prisoners.
The efforts are still small, dwarfed by the sheer size of the American prison population, and limited by political and financial roadblocks.
Prison conditions are not a priority for voters, polls show, and changes are sometimes unwelcome.
In March, thousands of corrections officers in New York state walked off the job to protest against new limitations on the use of solitary confinement, saying the changes would make their jobs more dangerous.
In Arizona, a new head of prisons who had sought to make them more humane faced sharp criticism after a prisoner who had been moved out of maximum security killed three fellow inmates.
And harsh punishments are part of the American DNA.
US President Donald Trump has said he would “love” to send American convicts to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Still, making prison life more like normal life is catching on in some surprising places.
“I’m amazed by how quickly these ideas are taking off across the US,” said Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Prisoner advocates say the changes make communities safer by better preparing prisoners for their eventual release and create a less stressful environment for prison workers.
However, the real catalyst is that US prisons are in crisis, struggling with severe staffing shortages, crumbling facilities and frequent violence.
Inmates in US prisons often endure extreme temperatures, vermin-infested food and years, or even decades, in solitary confinement. High-profile cases have brought attention to prolonged shackling, fatal beatings, and sexual abuse.
“It’s unsustainable, which is why we have to change the justice system to lock up only those who are a danger to others,” said Tricia Everest, secretary of public safety for Republican-led Oklahoma.
The state once had the country’s highest incarceration rate.
In 2016, voters approved measures to lower the penalties for some crimes and to direct the savings into mental health and substance abuse treatment. Everest has presided over the closure of four prisons.
European prisons are far safer than those in the US, experts say, with lower recidivism rates and healthier, happier employees.
In Berlin, which has 3.9 million residents and operates a correction system analogous to that of an American state, suicides are rare, and homicides are virtually non-existent.
Of course, the US has higher crime than European countries. America’s system of prisons and jails is the largest in the world, incarcerating nearly two million people, according to the World Prison Brief, which tracks global data on incarceration.
Change on that scale is difficult to accomplish, especially when the American public can be sceptical of spending money on what they regard as prisoners’ comfort.
Even in states that have been noted for overhauling some aspects of their criminal justice system, like Georgia and Texas, prison conditions can remain abysmal.
Georgia was singled out by the Justice Department last year for failing to protect inmates from “frequent, pervasive violence”, and in March a federal judge declared the heat in Texas prisons to be “plainly unconstitutional”.
By contrast, German prison officials say they consider loss of liberty to be punishment enough.
The courts have ruled that new prisons must provide single-occupancy cells at least 10sqm in size. Many have kitchens where residents may cook their own meals. One prison for young adults is experimenting with removing bars from some of the windows, on the premise that looking at bars is depressing.
Many of the rules were made in response to the shame of the country’s Nazi past, when prisons were used to suppress dissent and concentration camps held unspeakable horrors.
“What it all boils down to is the core principle, human dignity,” said Deputy Warden Johanna Schmid as she led the group through Tegel Prison’s leafy courtyards.
At Heidering Prison, warden Andreas Kratz showed off a visiting room with a kitchenette, bed, crib and balcony.
Time with family, German officials said, helps prisoners maintain the ties they will need to stay out of trouble when they are released.
In the US, privacy, time outside of cells and family visits are considered risky, and “overfamiliarity” between correction officers and inmates is prohibited.
German prisons take the opposite approach, known as dynamic security. Correction officers are expected to develop relationships with inmates and know when problems may arise.
Yvonne Gade, a correction officer in a ward that houses a small number of prisoners deemed particularly dangerous, shrugged off concerns about their access to a gym with free weights.
“It would be a huge potential for violence if you locked them up all the time,” she said.
Prisons in Europe are certainly not perfect. The Americans and Germans shared frustrations over gangs and a recent influx of synthetic marijuana.
Some of Germany’s problems show just how different the system is.
In one facility for young adults, a resident set his curtain on fire using a lighter he was permitted to have. In Saxony-Anhalt in April, a prisoner was accused of killing his wife during a five-hour, unsupervised conjugal visit.
The idea of showing US policymakers how European prisons work originated with a civil rights lawyer named Don Specter, whose lawsuits have led to changes to the California prison system.
In 2011, he accompanied a group of students on a visit to prisons in Germany and Scandinavia and was struck by how it changed the “hearts and minds” of people with diverse political views.
“It seemed that the magic sauce was actually seeing it in person,” Specter said.
When Specter was awarded a large fee in one of his cases, he used it to fund a trip abroad for prison officials in 2013.
Out of that grew the Global Justice Exchange Project at the Vera Institute of Justice, which organises regular trips to Germany, and a programme at the University of California, San Francisco called Amend, which has worked with Washington, Oregon, California and other states to change prison culture.
Working with Vera, six states have gone on to create special units for 18- to 25-year-olds that allow more frequent visits with family, shared responsibility for resolving conflicts and more out-of-cell time.
The effect of these transformations is difficult to measure, in part because many of the units are quite new and in part because doing research in prison is inherently complex.
However, a randomised, controlled trial in South Carolina showed that residents who were placed in the special units were 73% less likely to be disciplined for violence and 83% less likely to be sent to restrictive housing.
Such efforts can also improve staff morale.
Guards whose interactions with prisoners go beyond shackling and unshackling them are likely to consider their work more meaningful, said Reiter, the criminology professor.
Throughout the German tour, US officials were intrigued but also wrestled with how much of what they saw would work at home.
The biggest obstacle was cost, especially increasing staff-to-inmate ratios when states are already struggling to recruit officers. But even simple acts like a guard and inmate sharing a cup of coffee could require an overhaul of long-standing policies designed to prohibit fraternisation.
Differing concepts of liability also get in the way. In Germany, prisoners can use the toilet behind a closed door, while in the US toilets are typically installed in open cells, said Colby Braun, director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“You live in your bathroom,” he said. “With another person.”
When the state was planning a new prison, designers tried for a more dignified arrangement but could not achieve it, Braun said, because of a requirement that officers be able to see prisoners on their rounds.
The officials compared notes on how to overcome political resistance in their own states.
Braun said he tried to develop relationships with lawmakers so he could fend off proposals he viewed as counterproductive, like a recent one that would have ended the use of rehabilitation programmes and halfway houses.
On the other hand, members of the Massachusetts delegation were frustrated because, they said, its liberal legislature did not want to replace their prisons, some of which are more than 100 years old, even though new ones could make incarceration more humane.
For her part, Everest said she had learned how to speak the language of her state’s legislators and law enforcement officers.
“I don’t do criminal justice reform. It’s been politicised,” she said. “We are modernising the system.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shaila Dewan
Photographs by: Lena Mucha
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