“Can we snap our fingers and turn California prisons into Norway? No,” said Sharon Dolovich, director of the UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program. In Idaho, the Marshall Project reported, a prisoner, a guard and their families went fishing together. In Connecticut, they’re able to take a manufacturing course at a local community college. In North Dakota, about a dozen incarcerated people live in a trailer called the Transitional Housing Unit, living in their own rooms with locking doors. prisons has started to take hold in several states, part of a long-running effort by the California-based Prison Law Project to fly legislators to Norway where they can see the model firsthand.
The idea of a more communal model for U.S. Instead of waiting for people to be released, facing their first days outside a prison trying to find employment, Villapudua said it makes more sense to use their last two years inside for job training. Villapudua said he’s helped four formerly incarcerated people get Class A licenses and connected them with employers, for jobs he said pay more than $80,000. “Their first week, maybe even before they get out, they may have a paycheck because (trucking companies) now have signing bonuses.” “That’s how much a desperate need this field has.
PRISON LAW PROJECT OFFICE CALIFORNIA LICENSE
“That way, by the time they get out, they already have their Class A license and they know who their bosses are,” Villapudua said. For some inmates, that means getting a Class A driver’s license to drive big rigs before they are released.
PRISON LAW PROJECT OFFICE CALIFORNIA DRIVERS
And most importantly to Villapudua, they would get job training in areas that need more workers.įor Villapudua’s district, that means training truck drivers to combat a shortage of truckers willing to take on long-haul routes. The idea is that prisoners with two years or less left on their sentences would be chosen by the warden and moved into a campus on prison grounds where they would cook their own food, do their own laundry and make their own beds. The bill, AB 2730, passed unanimously and now heads to the Senate, with the support of both prison reform advocates and the union representing prison guards.
Prisoners get to wear their own clothes, cook their own food and have relative freedom of movement within the prison walls.ĭemocratic Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua of Stockton read about the Norwegian model last year and offered up a scaled-down version this year for California. Prisons in Norway and parts of Western Europe deemphasize the institutional aspects of incarcerated life. The country credits the change to reforms that prioritize rehabilitation over punishment - and to its guiding question on prison policy: When prisoners are released, what kind of neighbor does society want them to be?
In Norway, by contrast, recidivism is down from 60%-70% in the 1980s to about 20% today.
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