THE PUZZLE OF PRISON ORDER

Brown University political scientist Skarbek examines prisons around the world to determine how they work—or don’t.

“Most prisoners want the same things that we all want, such as good food, clean water, effective healthcare, and opportunities for education and recreation,” writes the author. Depending on where they are, they have widely different access to them. Ander Breivik, the right-wing Norwegian imprisoned for mass murder, has a treadmill, refrigerator, and video game system in his cell, which comprises three rooms. Many Scandinavian prisons are staffed at a 1:1 ratio of employees to prisoners and serve as models of humane treatment of criminals. Conversely, in Latin America, prisons tend to be severely understaffed, but they rely on models where the prisoners essentially run the show, sometimes even carrying weapons and working guard duty. American prisons fall somewhere in the middle, though they are markedly more riven by racial divides than society at large. By Skarbek’s account, women’s prisons are more orderly, and even though women prisoners resort to violence as frequently as men, they seldom do so with deadly force. Prisoners form self-governing societies inside the walls mostly to protect themselves against violent attacks; as Skarbek writes, no matter where they are, prisoners also “face the fundamental problem of political economy: how to create institutions that are strong enough to protect property rights but constrain these institutions so that political power is not used to violate people’s rights.” In situations where prisons are well governed by their keepers, they tend not to form gangs or other systems of “extralegal governance,” and where they are not, the prisoners must take care of such things themselves. The takeaway is that you don’t want to be imprisoned, especially not in violence-driven places such as the Civil War prison camp at Andersonville, but if you are, Sweden and Norway are the places to be.

An illuminating work of much interest to students of crime and punishment.