BASTA BASTOY!

Every prison reformer knows Bastoy. It’s a model prison in Norway, a short way from Oslo. It has just over 100 prisoners. It’s on an island in a lake. The prisoners live in cottages without locked doors and work on the farm. In their free time, they ride horses, cross country ski, play tennis, enjoy a sauna. They have a chef to cook for them. The staff: prisoner ratio is 1:2. And the reoffending rate  is just 16%, compared to the European average of 76%.  Or so we are told by an unending series of pilgrims to Bastoy (1). For it is the Holy Grail, the Promised Land, the Mecca of every prison reformer.

Really? No. Of course not. Once you stop to  think. And consider that:

1. My literature search of the Bodleian reveals not one single study that properly compares the reconviction rate for Bastoy with other Norwegian prisons, or community sentences in Norway. Such studies would need to control for differences in the type and characteristics of offenders, their offences, their previous criminal record. It has never been done (please email me if you know better!)
   
2. What we do know is that Bastoy is limited to prisoners serving long sentences – the average sentence is 5 years – and they are much older than the average prisoner (average is 40 years old) (2).  On both counts, they are entirely unrepresentative of the prison populaion. In this country, prisoners serving long sentences, and older prisoners, likewise have a much lower reconviction rate than younger prisoners, and those serving shorter terms.
   
3. We also know that Bastoy is highly selective (2). Prisoners have to apply and they must convince the authorities that they have a real wish to reform. The sending prison must support the application and document the prisoner’s previous behaviour. Prisoners involved in organised crime or certain other types of crime or presenting risk of escape are rejected. If prisoners try to escape, they are moved out. Thus, the Bastoy population is completely atypical, even of the subgroup of older, longer sentence prisoners in Norway. They are carefully chosen because everything about them says they are less likely to reoffend: and behold, they do reoffend less!
   
4. Every study that has attempted to compare reoffending rates between different countries has concluded that such comparisons are impossible because of a multitude of difference in definitions, recording, reporting, and how the criminal justice system works (3). So, comparisons between Bastoy and UK prisons cannot be made (they cannot even be made between Bastoy and other Norwegian prisons!) (and I bet Governors of other Norwegian prisons get pissed off with the Bastoy propoganda, just as Governors here did for many years with the quite unproven claims for Grendon).
   

So, statements about how much better Bastoy is at reducing reoffending than prisons in this country, or across Europe, are quite simply, meaningless. No-one who knows anything about the subject should even think of making such a comparison.

Wouldn't you like to live here?

But there are other reasons, too, why we should stop wittering on about Bastoy.

We know perfectly well, thank you, what is so wrong with our prisons and what to do about it, on the basis of real, grown up, research.

We know that prisoners are less likely to reoffending if when released they have somewhere to live and employment or training when they leave prisons and money to sustain them through their first days at liberty. And we know that many don’t (4).

We know that prisons are likely to have lower reoffending rates if the prisoners in them feel safe (5). We know that they often don’t feel safe, because violence and self-harm in our prisons have doubled since 2010 (6).

We know that the in 2010, our prisons were in the best state they’d been in for generations. And we know – or all of us who aren’t Tory Ministers, or their PR people, know – what was he main cause of its descent into violent chaos by the mid-2010s.  It was because Tory Ministers made swinging cuts – removing one third of front-line prison officers while not reducing prisoner numbers at all, in the process losing a lot of older, more experienced staff and middle managers (see analysis and graph here). We know that by cutting prison officer pay, the Tories made the very challenging job of a prison officer much less attractive than other jobs paying the same which are much less challenging, leading to dangerously high  staff turnover and difficulty in recruitment. We also know that reducing reoffending became at the make time more diffiuclt because the Tories botched a sell off of the probation service so badly that the whole lot had eventually to be renationalised.

We know what we need to do now to try to improve matters. And it’s not about model farms on lakes. Nope.

It would require us to:

• Convince the media and public that our high use of custody is both pointless and unaffordable, and stop building new prisons
• Through persuasion and legislation, reduce use of custody
• Increase staffing levels in prisons and prison officer pay, and fund that by closing some prisons, and provide a stable, safe environment where staff are properly supported and remunerated and want to stay and to a good job
• Rebuild a credible probation service on the ruins of Grayling’s disastrous privatisation
• Increase the proportion of prisoners who have somewhere to live and employment or training on release.

It’s a tall order, isn’t it? Especially in a tightened economic climate, made bleaker by a Tory Government which ensured that we have suffered worse economic damage from COVID than most other nations, and that additionally, did ourselves enormous economic harm through a botched Brexit.

Still, on balance it is no more difficult than  finding 800 model farms on 800 islands in 800 lakes, with horses, saunas, tennis courts, ski runs and a constant procession of gullible, ill informed, self-indulgent journalists.

 Notes

1. Eg “Inside Norway’s progressive prison system” CNN 3.8.11; “Bastoy: the Norwegian prison that works” Guardian 4.9.13 ; “Norwegian jails break concept of hard time” ; Tribune 20.5.12 “Crime and punishment Norwegian style” BBC News Online 18.5.12. And so on, and so on.


2. From prison’s website http://www.bastoyfengsel.no/English/straffegjennomforing-Eng.html


3. For example:

MoJ Statistics Bulletin “Compendium of  reoffending  statistics and analysis” November 2010 : “reoffending  rates between countries should  not be compared directly {because of] the range of underlying differences in the  criminal justice  systems and in the methods  of calculation”.

Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research: “Reducing reoffending: review of selected countries” 2012: “comparison of reoffending rates are not possible…such comparison would require thorough investigation to control for the many differences in defintions, reportinrg practices, enforcement cultures and pltical systems”

“A Systematic Review of Criminal Recidivism Rates Worldwide: Current Difficulties and Recommendations for Best Practice” S Fazel A Wolf. Plos One, 15.6.18 see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0130390.  “Sample selection and definitions of recidivism varied widely, and few countries were comparable. Conclusions. Recidivism data are currently not valid for international comparisons.”

4)  1 in 7 prisoners is homeless on release. Only 1 in 5 got a job on release which they held for 6 months or more. Prison Reform Trust Bromley Briefings Summer 2019


5) ”Exploring the Relationship between Prison Social Climate and Reoffending”
Katherine M. Auty & Alison Liebling. Justice Quarterly Volume 37, 2020 - Issue 2
 
6)  https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/the-prison-crisis-is-getting-worse-not-better