Our vision
Lessons from Norway
This paper shows how Norwegian prisons focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending rates. It also explores the UK prison system and how we can reform it.
Lessons from Norway: How we can improve our prisons by learning from Norway.
This paper looks at the issues with our justice system and how we can learn from Norway to improve it. It sets out how the UK can create a justice that focuses on rehabilitation, education and reducing reoffending rates.
Quick summary
- The UK has a broken prison system and it is getting worse. There are high levels of reoffending, decreasing budgets, unsafe areas within prisons and overcrowding.
- To improve our prisons, we should look to Norway. They have lower reoffending rates and, rather than our focus on punishment, instead focus on ensuring people are good neighbours when released.
- We need to improve prisons by upgrading them, ensuring prisoners have their own space to live in and giving prisoners more opportunities to learn new skills.
- To reduce the number of people in prisons we should focus more on reducing the number of shorter sentences given out.
Authors
Lauren Davison
Justice Spokesperson
Lauren is the co-Policy Officer for Open labour, the Secretary of the Young Fabians Criminal Justice Network and has a Masters in Criminology.