Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Engage and Exchange, Prison Reform in the Norwegian Model, A Better Way. I am just going to make a few administrative announcements as we all get settled in. So please remember that we want you to keep your camera off and your microphone muted during the program until such time later on as you're asking questions and ask to participate and follow up on your questions and all of that. We do definitely encourage questions. Please participate as much as you can.
And please do that by submitting them through the chat button. And you can see that at the bottom of your screen. If you have any questions, go ahead and shoot me an email. But please submit questions through the chat and we will take those and call on you later on.
Without further delay, I want to start the program for the introduction to the program beyond these boring announcements. I will turn it over to Nicole DeBoerde-Hodgegloub, who is going to give us the introduction to the program. And I also want to thank the NACDL Decarceration Committee, who has just put together this great series, all of which will be available on the website together for those who couldn't watch them all.
So thank you to everyone for putting this together. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the final installation of a three-part series on the state of mass incarceration in the United States. My name is Nicole Hotchklob, and I am the vice chair, along with the amazing Jackie Goodman of the Decarceration Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
We bring you this important and timely series as we join allies across the country to talk about across the nation in recognizing the injustice of 50 years of mass incarceration. These engage and exchange webinars are interactive discussions with the nation's leading authorities on the issues at the heart of the problem. Today, we have Amend. Amend is an organization that operates at the intersection of public health and human rights, implementing health-focused culture change initiatives, staff training, public education, advocacy, and policy-oriented research while referencing the Norwegian model of the corrections as a framework for change.
In addition, AMEND works in collaboration with policymakers and community leaders to develop strategies that promote decarceration and a more effective system of accountability and healing in the United States. Today, we are extremely fortunate to have David Cloud as our guest. He is the Director of Research at Amend UCSF.
He has over 12 years experience in research and community-based organizations. David has made significant contributions to addressing complex issues at the intersection of public health, drug policy, and mass incarceration. He is a trained lawyer, a public health expert, a psychologist, and he brings a unique multi-disciplinary perspective to this work.
Our host today, I'm also very fortunate and privileged to introduce, is our amazing colleague, Jerry Buding. Jerry is a partner at Buding, Williams, and Stilling, located in Brookfield, Wisconsin. He's best known for his defense of Stephen Avery in the widely publicly watched popular Netflix series, Making of a Murderer.
He has written a book on and embarked on a worldwide speaking tour, inspiring many and earning him the coveted John J. Fierce Advocate Award. He is also a vice chair of the Decarceration Committee at NACDL. And we are very much all looking forward to this discussion. Jerry and David, please take it away.
Thank you, Nicole. So David, I want to also take this opportunity to thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with us, both those who are listening live and those who are going to have an opportunity to look at it later. I know you've got a slide presentation that's fairly in-depth, so let's get going with that.
And then hopefully we'll have time at the end for questions, or if it looks like we have some, I may interrupt you in the middle to ask some. questions as we go along. Great.
Well, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity to present to you guys. It's exciting to share the work of a man with you all. And yeah, I welcome all questions and looking forward to the discussion. So can everyone see my screen? Yes.
Okay, great. So what we titled this talk was a public health approach to ending solitary confinement. I'm going to talk about immense work specifically addressing solitary confinement, though I guess it's important to understand that we. We work on more issues than just that. Let's see.
So just a little bit more about me. I am the director of research and evaluation for Amend. Amend is based at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
So the founder of our organization is a physician. Her name's Bree Williams. So we are based there. That's kind of our home. As was mentioned, I'm training in law, social epidemiology, and behavioral sciences.
And I'm a mixed methodologist. I'm in action-oriented research. So while I like to dig deep into data, and that's largely my job at Amend, my job is also translating what we find empirically to change policy, to change practice.
And so I'm very much in the field, in the prisons, and talking to people as much as I am kind of looking at data. So you already got a little taste of what Amend is. And the way we talk about ourselves to others is a public health-oriented human rights program. A lot of people that we work with focus on incarceration from a number of different points in the criminal legal continuum. We primarily work on urgent issues that are behind the walls of prisons in the United States.
We draw on a transdisciplinary approach. That's public health, medical ethics, human rights. And as was mentioned, we have this kind of unique partnership that I'll talk about later with the Norwegian Correctional Service. I think everyone on this call is probably well aware of our mass incarceration problem.
In fact, you've probably seen this graph many times, but I always find it striking no matter how many times I see it. We are the land of the free, but also the land of incarcerating the most people per capita in the world. This is a breakdown from the Very Handy Prison Policy Initiative that just kind of shows you the breakdown of where the nearly 2 million people are incarcerated. So the biggest bulk in prisons, a big chunk in local jails, and a number in federal prisons, too. As a data person, I kind of like different images of what mass incarceration looks like, kind of its imprint on the landscape.
This is actually kind of an older image, but if you were to kind of beam out and look down at the U.S., all of these little star-looking flashes represent state and federal prisons, nearly over 1,800 of them. Everyone here also is probably keenly aware that racial inequalities pervade kind of every piece of our criminal legal system. When we talk about incarceration and the risk of incarceration, It is especially prevalent in communities of color, specifically among Black men and Black women relative to white people.
So a lot of what I do, a lot of what we do at AMEND, as I've mentioned several times, is to look at this through a public health lens. How does 50 years of mass incarceration translate into health? How does it affect the health of people, families, communities, neighborhoods, and ultimately the population?
This is just a snapshot of a cover that I was the editor of for the American Journal of Public Health. And in the field of public health, we've actually seen really a rapid increase in the number of empirical papers, just scholarship focused on this topic. And so a lot of that research shows, I think as lawyers, a lot of the work is about often the individual, individual rights.
individual cases. In public health, population health is kind of the focus. So one way we think about the imprint of mass incarceration on our population health is through what we call the social determinants of health. And after 50 years, what the research is starting to show that this failed experiment has harmed us in really incalculable ways by altering the demographic composition of neighborhoods.
diminishing educational opportunities of youth, stagnating economic mobility, causing housing securities, depriving people of social benefits, and as we saw in the election cycles, siphoning political capital. You know, we've been able to start measuring some of this at a population level. So there's a lot of research coming out that, you know, how we define the health and vibrancy of our communities often in basic kind of vital statistics life expectancy mortality morbidity and there's just a flurry of research coming out showing that level that we incarcerate our people is having profound kind of intergenerational harms on our health as a population. Reduced life expectancy, infant mortality, child mortality, overdose, infectious disease transmission.
The level of incarceration that we have can be traced down to nearly almost every detrimental health outcome you can think of. But what's kind of missing, at least in the field of public health, is greater attention to the social conditions that are within the walls of jails and prisons. We kind of overlook these, at least in public health.
We think of incarceration as this kind of thing that a lot of people see on TV and have a popular kind of misunderstanding of what life is like behind the walls and what people experience when they're there. In fact, public health does a pretty poor job of documenting the prevalence of different conditions, but it's... mainly been up to academics to kind of figure this out, but probably not surprising to you. If you compare the rates of common chronic communicable or behavioral disorders and disease, they're gravely outpaced what we see in the community among people who are in jails and prisons.
That's everything from HIV and STDs to serious mental illness and suicide, and then the aging crisis, of course, which you may know. may know about. This is just something how I kind of a schematic image that I often use to communicate to people to get them to grasp why it's important to care about what happens in jails and prisons and the conditions that people experience. All of these things in red boxes are something that characterize many carceral, many big prisons across the US. If we're releasing about 650,000, 600,000 people per year.
often to already disadvantaged communities with at least about 68% of them returning in three years. You can just see and think about the cycle that that goes on for 50 years, what it's going to do to us as a society. I want to shift and get people to think about prison conditions and this kind of paradoxical way. It's like on the one hand, And overcrowding is something that is so prevalent in the problem with just the scale of incarceration that we have.
It's kind of a root cause of a lot of the other conditions that we see, the violence, you know, the inadequate access to some of the services that are there, you know, the long lines for medications and services, etc. So on one hand, you have just immense overcrowding. On the other hand, there's also. a real problem with being completely isolated and alone. So a lot of these prisons are spaces where you can be have zero privacy, you're crowded around hundreds of other people, and just can't get away.
And at the same time, and in the same place, there are other people who are spending time in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement, you probably have know at least a little bit about this, but it's the you know, just being continuously exposed to social isolation, idleness, being deprived of kind of sensory and material stimulation for somewhere around 22 to 24 hours a day. We haven't really had our government or any oversight entity do a good job of tracking how many people are living in this type of setting at any given time.
The best estimates we have actually come from a self-reported survey that Yale Law School does every couple of years or so. And right now, probably the... The estimate says on any given day, there are roughly about 60,000 people in solitary confinement and in prisons. That's state prison.
So that's not federal prisons. That's not jails. That's not immigration detention.
So it's a very conservative estimate of the scale of solitary confinement in this country. Solitary confinement is as old as the penitentiary itself. But it is one that has always been known to be harmful and kind of evolved. troubling ways, especially during the era of mass incarceration, where it became really just about warehousing people.
The length of people stay there can vary. It depends on a lot of things that I don't have time to get into today, but it can range from anywhere from days to years to decades. Probably not surprising to anyone here, but there's a ton of evidence. I've actually found articles going back into the mid-hundreds in the medical literature. how harmful it can be to relegate someone to living in a place about the size of a parking it's solitary confinement has been linked to profound harmful mental and physical health outcomes kind of at least self-injury, suicidality, as well as excess mortality post-release.
Something people are starting to think about a little bit more, and it's definitely something that at Amend we think is important, is starting to focus on these environments not just as profoundly harmful to incarcerated people, but also as an occupational health hazard. And I'll talk a little bit more about exactly why I think that's important. So a question we're constantly asking ourselves as public health people working in correction spaces, can our public health healthcare perspective kind of navigate all the politics and get some real stuff done to address some of these kind of urgent human rights issues?
One thing I probably should have had this slide before, but when you think about solitary confinement and who is in those spaces, there's some incredible inequities that are hyper kind of exacerbated in these spaces. So people with serious mental health issues, cognitive or developmental disabilities, transgender persons, people who may be susceptible to victimization or deteriorating in the kind of overcrowded environment. These are often the people that end up in solitary confinement.
It's often because there's inadequate healthcare, there's inadequate services for them in the community in the first place. And there's often an untrained kind of correctional workforce that gets put in charge of their kind of daily existence. The other thing to just point out that, once again, racial and ethnic minorities are overrepresented, while white people are underrepresented in most solitary confinement units. I'm going to come back to this, actually, because this is about the occupational health piece. And I'm going to come back to this.
But just keep this kind of fact in the back of your mind. is that the average age of mortality among correctional officers is about 59. So I'm going to come back to that because it's a statistic we use a lot to kind of open the minds to frontline officers about the importance of the reforms that we're trying to promote. There's been incredible political activism on solitary confinement. Bree and I, just full disclosure, Bree and I are both on the steering committee of Unlock the Box. It's a kind of used to be a part of the ACLU but spun off and is the mothership for all the community organizations that are trying to pass state legislation on solitary across the country.
They've done kind of incredible work. Just since 2009, you can see just the uptick in bills filed to restrict or end solitary confinement in some way over the past relative decade or so. And here's just some trends and the type of laws that are being passed. young people.
A lot of this is focused on people who are especially susceptible to the harms of the isolation and the idleness, et cetera. So vulnerable people, that's like people with serious mental health issues, pregnant women. Then trend three, there are five bills in five states.
You can kind of see them colored in red below that have passed the Mandela rule, which is a rule that says 15 consecutive days of any form of solitary confinement. should be prohibited and ended. And then reporting and oversight.
This is about reporting on the use of data or the use of solitary and then fully ending solitary for all people. Two bills passed in one state. So the point I want to make here is that as a public health person, when I look at the issue of solitary, Of course, I see like a big punitive penal system that is so horrible in so many ways.
But when I ask the question of why people are there and what we should do about it, I actually think that our social service and public health systems, they have to carry some of the blame too. So a lot of the failures that we've had over the past 50 to 60 years in public health are coming to roost in these units. And as I see all these laws passed and these hard fought battles in court get some success, now the question I think really is, okay, what do we do about it? How do we translate the letter of the law into demonstrable change in the existence of the people who've been suffering?
So that's what I'm going to shift to talk about now. This is, I guess, kind of the meat of the talk, but it's a public health approach to ending solitary confinement. And I promise I'm going to get to the Norway stuff. So we have a number of different approaches that we use that we consider to be a public health approach.
And I'm going to go through each of these. So the first is. We're academics.
We're based at a university. So a lot of our communication comes in the literature and, you know, major medical journals, public health journals, and different forums like that. So we publish a lot.
This is just an example of a piece I published in the American Journal of Public Health that just tries to frame this problem as a public health issue. Because oftentimes, if you look at the solitary confinement literature and something like criminology or criminal justice, you're going to come away with kind of a different set of solutions that are, in my opinion, a little less visionary and a little less encompassing of what we need to do from a broader societal perspective to end this practice. So one thing that Bree is, my boss, Bree Williams, the founder of Amanda, is very, very good at is, as a doctor, taking this idea that People who are incarcerated have a constitutional right to the community standard. That's adequate health care. She is very good at unpacking problems like solitary confinement from a lens of what would the standard of care be in the community and where are we failing.
This is just an example of a piece she wrote making this, but it's something that we apply all the time. And I'll get into a couple of examples. Another thing we do is try to use the language of public health theory. and the methods of epidemiology to really hone in on power structures and what's driving this phenomena of people dehumanizing people. So this is just a paper that I published recently with Bree about self-injury and the different forms of power that correctional officers have to inflict harm on people with serious mental health issues that are in here.
So this is a little academic, but I think it has very practical kind of implications. When you look at solitary, people often think mostly about social isolation, being alone, and the harmfulness of loneliness, and all of that is very real and very important. There are often a lot of other things that go on, not just in solitary units, but in other places too. Power to deprive people of food, water, electricity, take their mattress away.
And so basically we took this data set and tried to quantify this term of cumulative dehumanization. It's a construct. used to understand, you know, why agents like police agents or correctional officers, why some things become normal to them or perceived as ordinary or routine and how those things kind of accumulate to cause psychological distress. And basically, I'll just cut to the chase here, but we found basically with each additional type of dehumanization that a person experienced, and this was a survey of...
incarcerated men who were in the solitary units in Louisiana, we found that that was mediating this relationship between having a serious mental health issue and self-injury. So in practical terms, it means that just having the power to dehumanize people by taking away their basic sustenance and inflicting violence is really part of the driving force behind something as serious as self-injury that occurs in prisons. Another thing, looking at this issue from a public health lens and accountability for public health, is a study that Bree and my colleague Cyrus did.
They just looked at the National Institute of Health. They said, what is our public health system doing to promote scholarship and an understanding of this problem? In public health and medicine, we rely on the NIH for grants. We rely on them to fund our salaries, our research, and the amount they allot that could be used to understand. the implications of the criminal legal system are absolutely minuscule.
So they looked at over 250,000 NIH grants and found that 0.1% focused on the health of people in the criminal legal system. It's just about 1.5% of health disparities budget. Despite the fact that, you know, health disparities, you know, come to roost in jails and prisons, just a minuscule amount of attention is paid to it. And this comes to the data we collect too. A lot of the data we have to understand the health of our society is derived from legislatively mandated surveys that the federal government collects.
So it's one of the most basic functions of epidemiology that public health institutes do. If you look at all those data sets that people rely on to understand health conditions kind of across our society, once again, jails and prisons are... absent from this.
The people kind of disappear. You may have heard this in the calculation of things like labor statistics and the progress since the civil rights movement of addressing things like unemployment and economic equality. Just like that, where you exclude incarcerated people from the equation, when you exclude incarcerated people from your definition of population health, you are gravely underestimating how bad it is and what the problems are.
So academics are like us, are often in a position of getting the data ourselves. So another thing we do is we ground case studies in the public health framework to give. people in our field, public professionals, more ownership of the problem. We want them to see where we're falling short and we want them to step into a space that they may be less familiar or they may be working and they didn't even realize that the way they're behaving or the things they're being asked to do contradict some of the ethical codes that they've taken. This is just one example of a paper that my colleague Cyrus did.
They took a legal case to really understand and how medical professionals working in solitary confinement units, how they're often putting these what they call dual loyalties, making decisions about placements in an environment that is known to cause so much harm. So that first do no harm mantra you hear as a clinical physician or a medical professional, how much of what correctional physicians are asked to do in a place where solitary confinement exists. contradicts their code of medical ethics.
So we write about that and try to amplify the medical ethics argument to this as well. This is something that we put out really rapidly during the in the earlier days of the COVID-19. We were very worried about solitary confinement, the thing we knew solitary confinement to be, to just rapidly increase for quarantine and social separation.
So that's just an example. I won't go into that one. But all of this kind of comes back to the elephant in the room is just the call for decarceration.
And while most of our work does focus on inside, the argument always in our mind and something that we are adamant about is the importance of decarceration. One, I think, final example of kind of how we put solitary confinement into the public health sphere is just looking how it intersects with other public health crisis. So this is a paper that we published about the association of solitary confinement with mortality after release.
And basically we just proved a linkage between that and premature death due to suicide, opioid overdose, and homicide. And lastly, like... One thing I think we're pretty good at, especially Dr. Williams, is getting interdisciplinary consensus that this practice needs to go. So this is a statement that's called the Consensus Statement from Santa Cruz Summit.
And this brought together experts from healthcare, DOC leaders, academics, attorneys, and survivors of solitary to really just put together all of the evidence and a very kind of firm argument we stand together in addressing this problem. And I think those types of coalitions are just absolutely necessary. So that's something we do in academic literature and we write it on the paper, but we're also doing it in practice.
And lastly, I think this will be probably the more exciting part, is we identify promising health focused solutions to invest in. So we often find ourselves, before I get into the Norway stuff, work being in places where there's probably some type of appetite to do something about solitary confinement. Maybe there was a law passed.
Maybe there's litigation looming. For whatever reason, the doors are often open to us to help solve a problem. And one of the most challenging things, I think, is finding a way to do it. And so I'm going to talk about an example of one way we think we're starting to do it in a couple of places.
So a big component of Amend is our partnership with Norwegians and about. 30 years ago or so, Norway's prisons were facing many of the same problems that we were. Crowding, violence, inhumane conditions, and they embarked upon a completely different overhaul of their entire system, driven by entirely different principles that are rooted in public health and human rights.
It's really interesting. I would encourage folks if they want to do some kind of side reading on this to kind of just read about the history of Norway's model because it's something that we hammer home with people in our group, just to let them know that it can be done. One of the biggest mantras in Norway is that people go to court to be punished, but they go to prison to become better neighbors.
It's a very simple way to look at the, to kind of conceptualize their approach. So there are a few core correctional principles that the Norwegians use. And we take those principles and try to adapt them and implement them and make them stick in the United States. The first is dynamic security.
And this is very, very, very basic stuff. And it's one of the most fundamental ones to culture change. And to be honest, it's one of the hardest ones to put into motion in some of the prisons we work in in the US.
It's just the idea that investing in your human relationships makes healthier people and safer institutions. Everything from a good morning to a fist bump to just being a decent human. is something that you don't see. I mean, for those of you who've been in jails and prisons in the U.S., you know, it's kind of a no-no to talk to guards. You know, you don't cross that line.
It doesn't look like that in Norway at all. And so this is something that is fundamental, but often very hard to translate. Progression is the other thing. And this is the idea that the more closed off... a correctional system is, the harder it's going to be to combat.
People progress towards freedom through hard work, healthy living, and motivation. So with each step, they get more responsibility and more freedom. So the picture you're seeing right here, this is our colleague Tom, and he worked at a prison in Norway called Bastøy. You may have heard about it, but it's actually on this quite beautiful island, and it has people who are head served, you know, maximum custody sentences and have left some of the bigger, more secure prisons and are preparing to go home in the next couple of years or so. So many of these individuals will live in a home together, cook meals together, take a ferry across the boat, some of them, to go to work for the day and come back.
It's really this practice of freedom. So that's in progression runs from the day one that you come to the prison, they're preparing you to go home. The other idea that is really different than it is in the U.S. is the idea of normalization.
So again, that idea that the punishment that the courts impose is the deprivation of liberty. So with that, prisons should resemble life outside as much as possible. That makes it easier to come home.
That makes total sense, right? Like if you go in a lot of Norwegian prisons, they have grocery stores like the one you see here. You can get nutritious meals.
This looks like a good bodega in New York. or like a good kind of supermarket. You can buy kind of all the groceries that you would need. You take them home. You cook many of the meals yourself.
You cook meals with your neighbors. Sometimes you cook meals with the staff who's there. That's just one example.
The other picture you see is kind of, this is a, I think this is a Halden prison, the bed. That's kind of more akin to a college dorm. A lot of the cells look like that.
And this is a forest. This is a Halden, which is one of the most secure. prisons in Norway.
This is a forest where people can go out and interact with nature. A lot of people, especially in solitary confinement in the U.S., do not have a relationship with nature, which we all know is important to keep us balanced and human. So we've been working with Norway for a while.
I've been with the men since 2019, but the partnership predates me. So around 2015... Brie and Cyrus, my colleagues, started running these immersion programs to expose kind of the brass, the high-level officials to the Norwegian system. They started in these states and put together these delegations of DOC leaders, lawmakers, top-level bureaucrats, and trying to just bring them and give them kind of inspiration to want to do something different from the top level.
It's what we call our hearts and minds policy, policymaker immersion program. And that's what I just described there. There's a photo snap of one of our delegations. But as we kind of have grown, we've actually started to work with fewer states and dive much deeper.
So we've added a component, which I think is essential, is what we call the strategy. And that is bringing the kind of frontline correctional staff into the mix, into these immersion programs. And we don't just bring people to Norway.
We also bring the Norwegians here to the states. So we actually run something called the Amend Academy. And that is a training program that happens in Norway, where all the members of the Norwegian Correctional Service who are kind of our trainers, we pay them, they come, they show up, we teach them how to teach their counterparts in the US.
And so we really intensified working in California, Oregon, North Dakota, and Washington, and have really invested in the people who we learned actually hold a lot more power than they realize. And that's the frontline correctional officers, sergeants, lieutenants, people who have the most daily kind of interaction with incarcerated people. And therefore, in our opinion, the most immediate opportunity to kind of change their daily experience. So I kind of like glossing over all of the things we do, but we're not just taking people on visits and saying go forth. We have a very kind of involved process of setting.
getting them to come up with plans, helping them along the way to come up with practical strategies that work for them to make some big changes in their institutions at home. Sometimes we're on a small scale, sometimes we're on a big scale. This to the right is a paper that we published, I think, in 2020. And this is North Dakota is one of the first places that we really went deep into.
And so they basically made a decision. if you read this paper, to knock out Solitary. Their administrator at the time had come with us.
She had had this like epiphany and had come back and wanted to do something different. This chart on the right just shows the kind of pre-level of Solitary, the red and blue lines, and then that big dip and sustained kind of reduction is kind of after the fact. Some of the reforms that we helped get off the ground that were very much everything from the dynamic security that I mentioned. all the way to like changing policy on who can go in solitary, how long they can stay there, and really focusing on getting people out. And one thing that's really important about our work is this idea of staff experiences and staff wellness.
You know, we have found being on the side of working in legislation that a lot of these officers don't want to be told what to do. But if you give them... the opportunity to be part of the change and explain to them a rationale that makes sense for them, then they might come along. But this is just a quote from one of the officers in Norway that said, I'm sorry, in North Dakota that said, you know, now we've decided we don't really want to be cops as officers. We want to, rather than be a librarian, we want to be more educators, social workers, behavioral health person, someone who just wants to work with the people.
So what he's saying there is that After being a part of a system that actually harmed people, having the opportunity to flip that around is something that's kind of changed the calculus of who they're recruiting to work at the prison. When you hear people say that, you know, you're going to reduce solitary confinement, especially when you tell a correctional audience, one of the things they're going to worry about the most is increases in institutional violence. And this is a real, not going to, you know, sugarcoat that. If you hold people in a box for.
months, years, decades, there's a good chance they're not going to be too happy with you, you know, when they come back. So this is something that they're constantly worrying about, something that the model that we're running with is designed to address. But this is, in the paper I just mentioned, this is something we found not to be the case. So there was actually less perceived institutional violence. So people, after the reforms were made, people were like, wow, this place is...
It's less noisy. It's more quiet. There's less violence. Like it's a better place to come to work.
It's a better place to come to live. And a lot of my fears really did not manifest. And that's in fact what we saw in the data too. And this is just a fancy graph of looking at this line right here in 2016 when these reforms were kind of fully implemented.
These regression lines of dips and levels of fights among incarcerated people, assaults. And those are just the two different institutions. So the takeaway here is that this kind of first, our first foray into this Norwegian solitary reform in North Dakota, which is a place that didn't have a legislation that didn't have looming litigation, this approach to go in and just make these changes in this relatively small system, at least in this study period, had achieved some pretty remarkable results. Let's skip over this for now.
And so as we get into more complex prison systems like California, Oregon, and Washington, which are much, much bigger than North Dakota. we needed to think about another approach. I mean, some of the supermax units and places where people have been in isolation for very, very long periods of time, we found to be just in need of a different kind of model. So I'm going to talk now about this thing called the Norwegian Resource Team, and this is something that was developed by the Norwegian Correctional Service.
And it's really focused on people who they define as the highest risk, highest need. And by highest risk, I mean people who have recently been involved in pretty instances of violence, usually against other incarcerated people or staff. And many of them have pretty profound mental health issues.
And so that kind of combination is in the U.S. often a rationale for we can't end solitary confinement because there's always these people who are going to need to be confined. And so we have found with this model that we want to challenge that kind of assumption. We want to challenge that reality. And so we're beginning to explore a model to do that.
So what is the resource team? The way we define it is an intensive harm and violence reduction program that meets the needs of the highest risk, highest need people. It's increased attention from trained staff. So this is really about those front, again, those frontline correctional officers who are working and having most of the contact with the people in these units.
So it's interdisciplinary. So we want to involve custody, health care. and peer mentors. And we want to just completely recalibrate the office of these units to change their jobs. Rather than putting people in coffs, locking their doors, and delivering meals, we actually want to create a team where their job is specifically to get these people out of isolation, to do something about them, to change their daily existence, to make them feel supported, and work towards some kind of common goals.
And so this is something we've really been investing in in a couple of different places. So we give them a couple of different opportunities to learn these skills. Sometimes it involves sending them to Norway, doing what we call job shadow.
So they'll go hang out with the resource teams in Norway for an extended period of time, and they'll come back to the facilities in the U.S. and do some of these trainings. And kind of in the interim between that, we're kind of helping them develop policies. troubleshoot and things like that. But it's everything from learning about mental health issues, the harms of isolation on people, to fundamental skills that frankly were not taught in the academy around relationship building, empathy, communication, de-escalation, and violence prevention. And so this is just, these are some photos from in Norway, like doing some of these simulation trainings.
trying to teach them different ways to de-escalate and work with people who have been harmed, who have been traumatized by the prison system. And so now I'm going to get to some of our early results. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the first place we started trying to do that, and that's in Oregon, at the Oregon State Penitentiary. So after we, the resource team kind of got started there piecemeal.
So what it took was this officer here that you can see in the slide with the man at the desk, he was one of the first people to go over there and come back to the States and say, I want a different job. I can't continue to work in an environment that when these are the results, it's like the definition of insanity is continuing to do the exact same thing and getting the same results that you don't want. And so it really started from having high level support.
at the at the doc administrator level but having people on the ground who were going to their supervisors and say hey i want to do this differently and i want to be in charge of it we started on a pilot scale and eventually over time got them five fully funded positions to or help them get that um to have this dedicated resource team and so after let's say you know was it like 18 months what kind of things did we start to see so we asked kind of staff before and after, at least at the six-month mark, have you been the target of a direct assault? So you're seeing a little drop in that. But when you looked at the data kind of over a longer period of time where they're kind of perceived things panning out, and indeed they were. So in the special housing unit at this penitentiary, we were seeing drops in disciplinary infractions, drops in the rate of assaults, kind of like big drops, like 55, 60. 56%, almost 75%. in a relatively short period of time.
And I think this is one of the more important things, and this is the quarterly use of force incidents. So this is on the solitary confinement units where not too long ago, 2016, Disability Rights was knocking on the door to bring major litigation against them for their solitary confinement use practices with people with serious mental health issues. And part of the MOU they entered into with them was really to get this use of force down.
And so if you follow the line, this around this 2018 is when we started piloting and getting them involved. And then there's just been this big, huge drop in the quarterly use of force on the units where this resource team has been operating. We also, you know, go into the prisons and talk to the people participating on these programs.
I don't have time to go into all the detail, but this is just one example of, I think, how the resource team fundamentally changes the. the culture and the dynamics between the people who live there and the people who work there. So we asked him about the resource team and he said, that's what the resource team is.
Do you know how many times I tried to tell them, don't come to my door. I'm not going, but they still showed up. I said, how are you doing, man?
Come on, man. Let's go. Let's go play basketball. You got to get out of your cell.
He would tell them he was not even in the mood. Well, at first it was just the conversations and good vibes. But after that, it turned different.
It turned all to loyalty. You know what I'm saying? It's just basically they're not going to give up on you because they got everybody giving up on you. That's the hell.
That's how the hell you end up in prison. This is another guy who said, sometimes a person just needs to know that they're cared for. They have a place, even if it's been temporarily shattered. So while the resource team can't heal all the trauma, they can help slowly and methodically get past some of the pain. And we're starting to see benefits from staff too.
I mean, just like transformations in some of the people that have been working with us. So this is one guy who said, I would say during the first 15 years I worked here, I was pretty hardened. During that time, I saw multiple guys that went from, hey, I'm completely normal to a mental three situation. And today I believe in my heart that we created some of that.
Under my current time in special housing, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. So you can see this kind of reckoning that people are starting to have with this approach that if you just expose them to a different way of doing this, of what it means to treat people with humanity. and what you get for it personally, but also just you start to transform the way they think about incarceration and criminal justice and their job as a correctional officer. It's really cool to see. And these are just some other things.
I did mention at the beginning that staff wellness is really important. And sometimes this is how we get them to listen to us because, you know, you have to understand that a lot, especially in some of these solitary units, there have been clashes and conflicts with a lot of these guys for years. And so it's kind of a hard sell sometimes to say, Hey, we want to create this program where we're getting it out of a cell and you're going to go play basketball with him and learn how to talk to him. Or you're going to sit down with him for a couple hours and cook a meal together and just fundamentally change everything that we, you, that goes against what you were taught. And you have a lot of people look at you and be like, dude, you're crazy.
But if you start to explain to them and have them experience, the changes that they can feel with their own kind of health and wellness and the way they think about going to work, that's when it really starts to materialize for them. And that's when it starts to spread to people around them. And we start to get some of the naysayers. So just reductions, we have to do more research on this. This is pretty early data, but a lot of the other qualitative data that we're seeing and just the people we've gotten to know, we're seeing some pretty important improvements in people from everything from just behavioral things to symptoms of...
trauma and things that people experience working as correctional officers and just increased job satisfaction. We get letters all the time. This was one from one of the first people who the resource team worked with in Oregon. And this was a letter that basically said that, you know, he had been in solitary for so long and this was someone who was smearing, you know, feces on his cell on almost a daily basis, self-harm.
you know kind of a horrific situation and over time you know the resource team basically got him to agree to work with them and he said you know he wrote this letter saying the first time he was you know excited but also very skeptical um they walked him out to a part into the grass where he had hadn't been in quite some period of time and he saw the gun towers and he actually felt like for one second maybe this was it but after he realized it wasn't and they got back and started telling him more about what this program was about and sense that it's kind of had a pretty transformative change in his life. And in fact, this is him before. You can see the gash in his head.
And this was him just months later after undoing the pieces of solitary confinement. So this is Jerry. Can I? I know this is great stuff. And I don't know how much more you've got in this.
This is my last slide. OK, great. We finish up.
So just to conclude real quickly. you know we're going to keep expanding this model building from the ground up and just trying to build energy between um people who are working more on the decarceral side with you know with what we're doing so there's our team thanks to everybody there um these are our funders i can do that without them so i'll go ahead and stop okay we've got um we've got a question from somebody from florida who um I wonder if you've got any ideas on how to help get the message and really make it sink in for lawmakers. You guys are academics and you've got a lot of great data. But as we often see, lawmakers are flooded with correspondence.
They don't have a lot of time to read. Bills get passed without them actually reading the whole things, unfortunately. And do you have any suggestions on how to really help it sink in the message? for the law. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I think we have a program that I hope is going to help with that at some point. And so we have something called the amend ambassadors, and these are mostly correctional professionals who kind of excel in our programming and really lead some of this transformative change. We actually try to educate them and equip them and make them comfortable with speaking out in public and supportive stuff.
Sometimes it might be writing an op-ed. about their experience and the importance of some of this stuff, or sometimes it might be standing up and talking to lawmakers. So I think that's one way, but I think like, um, media is a, is a good way to do it, but in a place like Florida, I think having some staff come out and kind of support this from a staff wellness perspective, I think will carry a lot of weight in a place like, like Florida.
Um, just to say that, you know, solitary reform is important for incarcerated people, but also there's a big staff wellness piece to this. And I think that's kind of an untapped thing that we're tapping into. So I've got a question.
It's fairly obvious what some of the obstacles might be in America to implementing some of these principles. We have a very punitive view of corrections, but I'm wondering, as you've worked with several states now, where do you think are the real obstacles? maybe opportunities, most promising aspects that we could change in corrections. Public health, I notice, is a big one, and focusing on life expectancy and health conditions for the staff is important. But where do you think are the types of the Norwegian model that where you think that's most likely that we might implement in America?
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing we always try to be clear of, and maybe I didn't do a great job, is that, you know, I don't think we're naive to think we can cut and paste Norway into the U.S. I mean, as a society, they have cradle to grave kind of social benefits and things that are working in kind of lockstep with their correctional system. We don't have that here.
And so I think what we're trying to do is to take some of these principles just to inspire people to think. differently and have transformative changes at different levels and in different places. We also don't want to be in the business of trying to build a Holden prison here. We don't want to build new prisons.
We don't want to put more into the infrastructure of mass incarceration. I think the challenge here is taking these principles, solving some kind of pressing human rights issues now, getting the people who work there who are trained not to think this way, to think in a way that is more aligned with public health and human rights. And then starting to do the work that needs to happen at the same time. And that's around the decarceration reform.
That's societal level stuff. So places that are doing it well, I think we see encouraging things in different places. There's a lot of positive things happening in all the places.
Would I hold any of them up as a model? I don't know yet. I think the jury's still going to be out on that. We have a very long way to go.
You know, I liked the comment of the... The North Dakota administrators who were saying that we're changing the whole idea of the type of people that we want to hire as correctional officers. We're not looking for.
people who want to be cops, guards. We're looking for people who want to work with individuals, more of a social worker model. And it seems to me that it's going to take some time to change over from the type of person that's already in those positions, correctional guards.
But it seems like you've also had some success changing people who have been entrenched in and the us versus them mentality oh yeah getting them to to become more involved with inmates oh yeah i mean honestly some of our big some of our ambassadors and some of our most influential people i would say were the ones that sat in the back of the room like this at first and looked at us like that like you're full of full of it um and i think breaking that down and having a little bit of reckoning with you them doing that a little bit with themselves, but us also, we go in with the harm reduction mentality, which is meeting people where they're at. And I think trying to not go and just, you know, be too judgmental about the way they were taught and recognize like the circumstances that led them to a career in corrections. You know, if you ask a lot of correctional officers in the US, why'd you choose this profession?
A lot of them are going to say for, I need to support my family because I have health insurance. And I think we need to flip that on its head. I mean, in Norway, they go to school for two years.
Very good training academy. And a lot of places in the States, it can be anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. And that's something we're trying to influence in the places where we're working. And we're providing training that... It's starting to kind of like pepper into some of the places we're working.
Some of the curriculum we develop is kind of finding its way there. But it's a long haul. It's going to be a long haul.
So you mentioned, just to go back to a couple of the Norwegian prisons, you mentioned Bastoy, which is this island, a fjord somewhere. If I understand it, that's a minimum security type of facility or no? Yeah, and it's back with that principle of progression. It's minimum security in the sense that people have, they may have started, they may have been in for murder or armed robbery, but a lot of them are on their way back to society. So they may have come from another prison and applied for a transfer there.
And at that point, they're working on reuniting with their family, finding a job, actually working in that job. And just. preparing for for going home um and it's um you know it's not just it's just not people who are in on short petty offenses it's my knowledge no no generally not um i could be a little wrong that might be happen sometimes but most of what i've learned about is yeah it's usually people who are have done more time and are about to go home but set this sensing in norway is you know it's way less than like the maximum sentence is around i think 22 years and then but they have another mechanism to keep people in for certain crimes. But yeah, people aren't staying as long in the first place.
And then the Halden prison that you mentioned is actually a maximum. It's a max. It's a max. A high wall. It very much feels like a prison.
It looks like a prison. But when you go inside, you know, it's aesthetically very different than a maximum security prison. When you walk in the walls, it feels like a prison. But when you go inside and you meet the people working there and just...
I don't know how many of you have been in prisons, but if you walk into a maximum security prison in California or Louisiana or something like that, you know, your body feels a certain way. And it's, it's just, it's just not like that. And, and Holden, you know, and part of it is the volume of people, but it's also the culture there. I mean, it's people are doing things, they're working, they're, they're in school, they have opportunities. There's not a lot of idleness.
And if it's idleness, it's usually, you know, the relaxing. doing something else. So people who are interested in this, you suggested some reading, but is there anything they can do to help get involved or to encourage Amend or maybe some other organizations to try and spread the word into their own states? You said Amend is actively involved in four right now. Well, yeah, we are.
And, you know, we're relatively small and it's actually grown in size, but. That's kind of our capacity is where we're working now. But I think we want this to spread to other places, obviously. And I think there are other organizations who have a similar approach. we call them Norwegian principles, but in reality, I mean, these are, these are things that are baked into a lot of the human rights laws that other countries are governed by.
So it's not, it doesn't have to be exclusive to the Norwegian thing. It's really about these principles. And so if people want to reach out to me, I'd be happy to perhaps have a conversation. There's a little Scandinavia project that it's in, in Pennsylvania that I think I mentioned earlier. But yeah, I'd be happy to.
to field any questions it's we try to publish on this as much as we can we're often i mean honestly working a lot behind the scenes and so i think over the next couple years we came out of covid and are starting to publish more and i think we're going to have a little bit more public face about this but we do a lot of work behind the scenes so so please do reach out great and i think we have your um contact information in the in the chat room for people um And we're a little bit over an hour. I don't know how much longer, Vanessa, we can go. I have one more question that somebody has also about, and this actually harkens back to my days years ago when I was a public defender. There are actually some people, unhoused individuals, who would deliberately commit petty crimes in order to get off the very cold streets of... Wisconsin in the middle of the winter.
Norway is obviously a freezing cold country as well in the winter. Is there any kind of data about maybe the number of people in America who actually do, who are unhoused and who commit these kinds of offenses just to get in as bad as our jails are that maybe as some temporary relief from the cold? Yeah, I don't know the statistics on Norway's housing insecurities. I do know it's less.
And they do have just a much better kind of, as I said, cradle to grave social welfare system. So the other thing to keep in mind is like they have a nationalized health care system, education system. And they have this thing called the import model, which means that teachers, librarians, doctors that work in the community systems are part of the same.
entity that works in the prison so they may come in and out it's just it's much more more fluid and they're much more well connected um i'm sure it happens there's still poverty there they're still struggling so i think wherever you see that you're gonna you know people who may be desperate for even like a health care surgery or something that they can't get in the community for whatever reason sometimes i have you know heard of people going to prison for that you know for that reason but they don't in norway they don't have jails like there's not the separate jails and prisons like you're usually going to go to a more unified place but you know i think it speaks back to just the bigger problem around what we have and what's accessible in our communities in the u.s being the richest nation and what we provide for housing health care and everything else all these problems that come to the solitary confinement units we're we're not doing a good enough job on the front end so um Sort of thinking ahead, I know that you work directly with staff and corrections. Do you have people at Amend who can be available for presentations to legislature? Yeah, we do that.
We do that some. We're actually we're just emailing about that the other day. So if you have something we think we might be helpful, just shoot us an email and we'll see if it's something we can we can put together.
But we have done that in the past. And Bree, our founder, is very experienced. I mean, she's been an expert witness.
She's very savvy as an expert witness in the legal world, too. So it's something we do. Because I got to think that a lot of legislatures are really unaware of this, the public health effect on not just the incarcerated people, but the staff.
Yeah, I think you're right. Statistic, you know, 59 years. life expectancy versus 75 or whatever it is for the general population.
It's pretty shocking. It is shocking and it really opens, it opens the officer's eyes up. But also I think, you know, a lot of the legislation that is passed is awesome. It's amazing to see more appetite to get this stuff through the legislatures, but often those bills are not attached with a plan to implement them.
You know, it's a lot of like, you can't put them in SALTA for this. There's a lot of restrictions and things you're supposed to do. but they're missing kind of this like how the heck do we do it piece and i think like what we're starting to do maybe start to figure a little bit of that out. So it's like, you know, it's chicken and egg thing.
It's like, we're, we need the law and the policy, but we also need the like ability to figure it out inside the institution, figure out what works. And I think that stuff, wellness piece is a, is a way to get the workforce on board because if they're just getting sued all the time and laws passed, these guys, you know, a lot of them, they're resistant. I mean, they're reluctant to adopt what a court's going to tell them to do. They don't want to do it. And There's got to be that culture change piece to it.
And I think public health can be the kind of language that can help, you know, people who've been taught to be antagonistic to each other, find some common ground. All right. Well, David, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and your time with us today. It's been extremely informative. And thank you for the work you do at Amend.
At our committee, there's a whole movement, I guess, nationally towards decarceration. There's sort of a split between abolitionists, shall we say, who want to just blow up the system and start over, and reformers. And even if the long-term goal might be to try and replace our prison system with something more humane, this seems to be an incremental approach that maybe in the interim, before we ever get to that stage, we can...
perhaps adopt some of these principles and you're doing great work to try and help bring them to to our to the forefront here in America. That's very well put and I appreciate it. I mean that's something that we think about a lot is where we fall in that spectrum and I guess one way that we look at it is that again from a public health or medical ethics if you're in a place where you see human suffering you do something about it and then exactly yeah. All right. Thank you both.
And thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. This has been a great opportunity to to really get some valuable information for us all to think about and figure out action items that we can all take part in to move forward. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you both so much.