I can say that Norway's prisons are "better" than the prisons in the USA, but to say this feels like it's ignoring the roles that the prisons actually play in either country, and the historical factors behind why the prison systems ended up so different from one another between the countries — i.e. while in both countries the prisons exist to uphold bourgeois rule, in the USA the prisons serve to more specifically reinforce the economic exploitation of Black people through prison labor and long-term harm to their well-being, whereas this is a non-factor in Norway, where most of the country's super-exploited can just be outright deported if they're caught doing a "crime", right? A 2015 article from Forskning.no quotes an employee of the Oslo police force, "Why should we use so much capacity imprisoning him up here instead of just flying him out again?"
I also feel like the discussion about Norway's prison system is still pretty dominated by how it's covered by bourgeois media, which tends to glamorize the actual conditions inside Norwegian prisons, either to frame Norway as a saintly society where even the worst monsters are treated with dignity, or to push an angle that the prisons are "too lenient" — when the truth is that you do have prison suicides in Norway, too, and my only experience meeting an ex-convict in Norway was someone who was a terminally unemployed addict (which, granted, is only an anecdote).
There's a lot that I don't know about the prisons in this country, or about prisons in general, but I'm still gonna link some 2023 articles from Tjen Folket on Bredtveit women's prison and its human rights violations here:
It's still a prison in a bourgeois dictatorship.
I can say that Norway's prisons are "better" than the prisons in the USA, but to say this feels like it's ignoring the roles that the prisons actually play in either country, and the historical factors behind why the prison systems ended up so different from one another between the countries — i.e. while in both countries the prisons exist to uphold bourgeois rule, in the USA the prisons serve to more specifically reinforce the economic exploitation of Black people through prison labor and long-term harm to their well-being, whereas this is a non-factor in Norway, where most of the country's super-exploited can just be outright deported if they're caught doing a "crime", right? A 2015 article from Forskning.no quotes an employee of the Oslo police force, "Why should we use so much capacity imprisoning him up here instead of just flying him out again?"
I also feel like the discussion about Norway's prison system is still pretty dominated by how it's covered by bourgeois media, which tends to glamorize the actual conditions inside Norwegian prisons, either to frame Norway as a saintly society where even the worst monsters are treated with dignity, or to push an angle that the prisons are "too lenient" — when the truth is that you do have prison suicides in Norway, too, and my only experience meeting an ex-convict in Norway was someone who was a terminally unemployed addict (which, granted, is only an anecdote).
There's a lot that I don't know about the prisons in this country, or about prisons in general, but I'm still gonna link some 2023 articles from Tjen Folket on Bredtveit women's prison and its human rights violations here:
https://tjen-folket.no/2023/07/30/bredtveit-kvinnefengsel-hoy-risiko-for-krenkelse-av-retten-til-liv/
https://tjen-folket.no/2023/05/28/bredtveit-kvinnefengsel-isolasjon-og-manglende-helsehjelp/