What US Officials Are Learning From German Prisons

A group of US prison officials from North Dakota, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma recently traveled to Germany, touring facilities that, at first glance, might look more like a university campus than a prison. As the New York Times recounts, the inmates wore regular clothes, cooked their own meals, and even worked with animals. One deputy prison warden from North Dakota started cataloguing potential weak points she spotted at the maximum-security Tegel prison, at least from a US perspective, including cell windows that opened and inmates at work beyond the gate.

Yet German prisons report lower violence and recidivism, with officials citing the principle of "human dignity" as foundational. As the Times puts it, "German prison officials say they consider loss of liberty to be punishment enough"; the paper sees the current approach as a reaction to the country's far grimmer use of prisons during its Nazi era as well. A handful of US states—prompted by dire conditions, staffing shortages, and rising violence—are now experimenting with similar approaches.

Projects modeled on European systems have emerged in California, Arizona, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, which now has a unit called Little Scandinavia in which inmates cook their own meals and can exercise alongside officers, per Science. It's set to expand to three other sites in the state. While there's still not much data on the impact, early evidence from one such experiment in South Carolina suggests a steep drop in disciplinary issues. But a meaningful shift will be hard to come by due to just how big the US prison population is (about 2 million people), the cost of implementing some of the changes, and political resistance.