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Massachusetts eyes Norway's rehabilitation-focused prison model 27%
By Stephanie Brown35%
7/22/2026, 5:26:18 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Representativeness Heuristic, and Negativity Bias, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 11.3% saturation with 118 hits. Analysis detected 1,102 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,047 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.4% and a BS Rank of 27% (14,859 of 20,097 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 73.90% of the article peer group.
Prison life in Norway and Northern Ireland looks markedly different from the U.S.: incarcerated people buy groceries, cook their own meals and play board games with officers.
In Norway, “they don’t look at the prison sentence necessarily as a punishment,” said Massachusetts Department of Correction Commissioner Shawn Jenkins.<em> </em>
Jenkins was one of a handful of department leaders who recently traveled to both nations to tour correctional facilities.
The state workers' "educational visit" was intended to give insights into an incarceration model widely considered more rehabilitative and less punitive than what's used in the United States.
The prisons “are designed to prepare people for release,” he said.
“A little bit of a different concept or view than we have in this country.”
The trip was part of Gov.
Maura Healey’s effort to renovate and “re-imagine” MCI-Framingham, one of the country’s oldest women’s prisons.
The administration's goal is to create a more rehabilitative facility, and it put $360 million toward that effort in 2025.
Jenkins and agency leadership visited Ringerike and Skien high-security prisons in Norway, a Norwegian correctional training center and the Hydebank Wood College and Women's Prison in Northern Ireland.
The tour was organized by Amend, a public health and prison reform program at the University of California San Francisco.
The department partnered with Amend in May, and the year-long-contract costs "roughly $160,000," according to a correction spokesperson.
The goal was to expose correction staff to other approaches to overseeing prisoners, said Cyrus Ahalt, chief program officer at Amend.
“In the Norwegian system they’ll say, ‘a person goes to court to be punished.
They go to prison to become a better neighbor,’ " he said.
But some prisoner advocates said the trip to Europe shouldn’t have been a priority, and the department instead should focus on getting input from people incarcerated in Massachusetts.
“I hope the DOC will listen to women who are incarcerated at MCI-Framingham right now,” said Mallory Hanora, with the group Families for Justice as Healing.
Families for Justice as Healing has repeatedly criticized the state’s renovation at MCI-Framingham, accusing the state of a lack of transparency around the project.
They also said the state should try other tactics to reduce incarceration, such as community supervision, wider use of medical parole for ill prisoners and more reentry support.
While the overseas visits were a first for Jenkins, Hanora said Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security workers have previously taken similar trips, but she felt “little” changed for prisoners after they returned.
Hanora is also skeptical the Norwegian model could ever be implemented in the U.S.
“The reality of a trip to Europe is that our social conditions and political conditions here are completely different,” she said.
Social safety programs in those countries’ “prevent entanglement in the criminal legal system in the first place.”
Jenkins acknowledged change is hard in corrections, and the solution can’t be “copy and paste” of any European model.
“But I think that we owe it to ourselves to take a different approach to how we're doing some of this stuff,” said Jenkins.
An alternative ethos
Jenkins said it was evident immediately that the Norwegian and Irish prisons operate under distinct philosophies, especially the relationships between staff and prisoners.
“It's sharing meals with them," Jenkins said.
"It's talking to them about their reentry plans.
It's talking to them about family and family visits.”
Norwegian officers attend a two-year college-level academy, while Massachusetts requires just 9 to 12 weeks of training with an emphasis on physical readiness.
“The expectations of correction officers [in Norway] is really almost the role of a social worker,” Jenkins said.
“They're required to engage with the incarcerated individuals on their re-entry work to ensure they're getting good medical care and mental health care.
It's almost like a caseload.”
Following the trip, Jenkins said the correction department would take a “deeper” look at how it trains staff in Massachusetts.
He was also struck by the concept of “normalization” — the idea that prison should resemble everyday life in the community as much as possible.
Norwegian prisoners bought groceries inside the facilities, cooked their own food and had more time and flexibility during family visits.
The prison buildings had better lighting, more greenery and less fencing.
Jenkins said Massachusetts already has some programs that embody this "normalization" philosophy.
MCI-Framingham offers a program for women under 30 to help them study, develop life skills and bond with their families before release.
The public restaurant at Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord trains prisoners in culinary arts and allows them to engage with the public.
Recidivism rates — the percentage of released individuals who end up imprisoned again — are one success metric of the Norwegian model.
Massachusetts reports one of the country’s lowest recidivism rates, with 26% of individuals reincarcerated within three years of their release, according to the state.
But in Norway, the rate of reconviction is 16% within two years, according to a 2024 study from the University College of Norwegian Correctional Service.
Jenkins also said he was impressed by how working conditions in European prison appeared to help correction officers stay in their jobs.
“Staff satisfaction, staff engagement really prolonged individuals' desire to work in the facilities or desire to make a career in corrections,” said Jenkins.
The concern is timely: Massachusetts recently lowered the minimum age to become a correction officer in response to a staffing shortage.
Jenkins said the department is still in the "design" phase of re-imaging MCI-Framingham.
But the trip “reinvigorated” his desire to implement “small wins”— changes that don't require a lot of money or policy shifts — that reflect the overseas models.
“It's engaging incarcerated individuals in ways that we may not have done in the past, right?”
he said.
“Talking to them about their families, talking to them about their reentry work, shaking their hands.”
Jenkins said he isn't certain what exact changes will take place or when, but he wants more programming that offers life skills training and allows prisoners access to gardens, sports, fresh food and even animals.
He's also reconsidering uniforms.
In the women's facility in Northern Ireland, he said he often “couldn't tell the difference between a staff member and an incarcerated individual.
They wore the same clothes.”
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