Menéndez brothers case: Erik and Lyle Menéndez built a green space in prison. It is inspired by this Norwegian idea.

COPENHAGEN — Almost 30 years after his parents were killed, Erik and Lyle Menendez launched a beautification project at the California prison where they are serving life sentences.

Their project was inspired by the Norwegian approach to imprisonment, which believes that rehabilitation in human prisons surrounded by nature leads to successful reintegration into society, even for those who have committed terrible crimes.

Norway is a long, narrow country in northern Europe, stretching 1,100 miles from north to south. It has created small prisons across the country, allowing people to serve their sentences close to home, said Kristian Mjland, a Norwegian associate professor of sociology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.

There are about 3,000 people in prison nationwide, he said, putting Norway’s per capita incarceration rate at about one-tenth that of the United States.

Norway has one of the lowest levels of recidivism in the world. Government statistics give that the proportion of people reconvicted within two years of their release in 2020 was 16%, with the figure falling each year. Meanwhile, a decade-long U.S. Department of Justice survey found that 66% of people released from state prisons in 24 states were rearrested within three years, and most of them were imprisoned again.

Mjland said Norway’s prison system is based on the principles that people should be “treated decently by decent, well-trained staff” and have “opportunities to engage in meaningful activities during the day” – something he called the “principle of normality.” ” – and that they should retain their basic rights.

Mjland, whose research has focused on punishments and prisons, said that, for example, prisoners in Norway retain the right to vote and access services such as libraries, health care and education provided by the same providers who work in the community. in general.

Norway also operates open prisons, some on islands where there is a lot of agricultural work and contact with nature. The most famous is on Bastoey Island, “which is very well situated in the Oslo Fjord,” Mjland said.

Even Anders Behring Breivik, who killed eight people in the bombing of a government building in Oslo in 2011 and then shot dead 69 more at a holiday camp for young left-wing activists, has a canteen, a gym and a TV room with an Xbox. The wall of his cell is decorated with a poster of the Eiffel Tower and the parakeets share his space.

The idea of ​​creating normal and humane conditions for people in prison is beginning to spread in the United States as well.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for example, has been trying in recent years to apply certain elements of the Nordic approach and introduced a program it calls “Little Scandinavia” at a Chester prison in 2022.

The Menendez brothers’ case was back in the public spotlight Thursday when the Los Angeles County district attorney recommended that their sentences of life in prison without parole be overturned. Prosecutors hope a judge will resentence them so they can be eligible for parole.

If the judge agrees, a parole board must approve your release. The final decision rests with the governor of California.

Their lawyer and the Los Angeles district attorney argued that they had already served enough time, citing evidence that they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their entertainment executive father. They also say the brothers, now in their 50s, are model prisoners who have committed themselves to rehabilitation and redemption.

Both point to the brothers’ years of efforts to improve the San Diego prison where they have lived for six years. Before that, the two had been held in separate prisons since 1996.

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In 2018, Lyle Menendez launched the Green Space beautification program at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center. His brother, Erik Menendez, is the lead painter of a massive mural depicting San Diego landmarks.

“This project hopes to normalize the environment inside the prison to reflect the living environment outside the prison,” Pedro Calderón Michel, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the AP in an email Friday.

The Menendez brothers’ work continues, with the ultimate goal of transforming the prison yard “from an oppressive slab of concrete and gravel to a standardized park-like campus environment surrounded by a majestic landscape mural,” according to the website of the project.

The final product will include outdoor classrooms, meeting spaces for rehabilitation groups and training areas for service dogs.

The prison system recently launched the “California Model” in hopes of implementing similar projects across the state to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education and reentry,” Calderón Michel wrote.

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The brothers’ attorney, Mark Geragos, said he believes Lyle Menendez learned about the Norwegian model during his college classes. Lyle Menendez is currently enrolled in a master’s program where he studied urban planning and recidivism, and Geragos said his client hopes the beautification will facilitate the reintroduction of parolees into society.

“When you’re in a gray space that’s not very welcoming, it’s disorienting to a certain extent,” Geragos told The Associated Press on Friday. “And then there’s the problem of the land not being something welcoming or useful in terms of acclimatizing and reacclimating to a community.”

Dominique Moran, a professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, said that in her research she found that introducing green spaces in prisons improves the well-being of prisoners and prison staff.

“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence, and they also reduce staff illness,” said Moran, author of “Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration.”

Moran has studied prisons around the world and said in an emailed statement that in the Scandinavian approach, “people go to prison AS punishment, not FOR further punishment.”

“Deprivation of liberty is in itself the punishment,” he said. “There should be no more punishments because of the nature of the environment people are in.”

Gera reported from Warsaw, Poland, and Dazio from Los Angeles. David Keyton contributed from Berlin.