Anita Chabria: California prison guards are dying too young. How Norway (yes, Norway) can help
OSLO, Norway — Inside Halden Fengsel, a high-security prison in Norway, inmates choose their own clothing. Knockoff track suits from designer brands such as Karl Lagerfeld are favored.
They buy fresh produce from their well-stocked grocery store and chop onions with knives from their shared kitchens.
They play in bands and walk in the woods and pray in a graceful holy room where clerestory windows beam sunlight down onto slate floors and a compass shows the direction of Mecca.
But what surprised California corrections officer Steve "Bull" Durham most on a recent visit to Halden wasn't the prisoners but the guards — how relaxed and happy his Norwegian counterparts were, and how casually they interacted with the inmates.
"I am blown away by it," he said.
Durham has been a California corrections officer for 25 years, much of it in the remote reaches of Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield. He looks like the kind of guy you'd nickname Bull. Big and bald, he leans forward when he walks, like he's battling the wind, or the world.
I met him on the sidewalk in front of the elegant Grand Hotel in Oslo, just down the street from the stately Royal Palace of King Harald V.
Durham was one of about a dozen members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., or CCPOA, the union that represents the women and men who work in our prisons, who let me tag along with them to Norway recently.
They were there to see firsthand what all the hype is when it comes to the so-called Scandinavian model of incarceration, which California hopes to import in coming months.
