Norway’s prisons are built around a radical idea: inmates will one day be someone’s neighbours again. They may earn wages, cook meals, and watch television in their cells, while the country reports one of the world’s lowest reoffending rates

Norway’s prisons are built around a radical idea: inmates will one day be someone’s neighbours again. They may earn wages, cook meals, and watch television in their cells, while the country reports one of the world’s lowest reoffending rates

Porcelain plates and stainless steel knives in a maximum-security prison sound like the punchline to a joke about Scandinavia. In Norway they are just the cutlery. Inmates there can hold a job, draw a small wage, cook their own dinner, watch television in a room that looks closer to student accommodation than a cell, and in many facilities receive conjugal visits from a spouse. And the country keeps posting one of the lowest reoffending rates an…