Waiting for an Echo Quotes

“Incarceration in America routinely makes mentally ill people worse. And just as routinely it renders stable people psychiatrically unwell. Our system is quite literally maddening—a truth that categorically undermines our stated goals of safe and secure communities.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Our correctional practices prioritize vengeance and suffering over justice and rehabilitation. Incarceration in America routinely makes mentally ill people worse. And just as routinely it renders stable people psychiatrically unwell. Our system is quite literally maddening—a truth that categorically undermines our stated goals of safe and secure communities.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“If you treat the men here with respect, they behave as if they deserve it,” he says to me. “If you trust them, they internalize that you believe that they are worthy of your trust.” And by that logic the inverse is also true: if you treat men like monsters, they behave like monsters.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“As she runs, I find myself thinking again about self-psychology and how it plays a role in the interactions here. Whatever good is to be found in these men is fostered, encouraged, seen, and appreciated. Whereas in our nation’s prisons, the mirroring that prison inmates receive is that they are bad and dangerous,”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Like the flat-screen TVs, some of these amenities have come under fire—even among Norwegians—as overly luxurious. Jan Strømnes shrugs off these accusations and meets them with pragmatism. Drum sets? Climbing walls? Treadmills? “You’re removing frustration and aggression,” he responds. “We believe in positive activity.” The idea is to teach these men productive ways to channel the energy and emotions that have previously resulted in conflict and violence. Work, school, and exercise are not indulgences but strategic tools.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“The concept at Halden of staff “being on the same side” as the inmates is not how most people would describe the dynamics within prisons. But it’s exactly what I see as Warden Høidal and I continue our tour of the Halden grounds. We pass the prison’s print shop, where staff and men are working together, unfurling the posters they’ve designed as they emerge from machines, assessing them with admiration and critique. Warden Høidal introduces me to a group of the men. One man asks a question in Norwegian, gesturing at me. Høidal nods, and the man bustles away. I look at the warden quizzically. “They would like to give you a gift,” he explains as the man returns. Smiling, the man hands me an apron and a cookbook, both emblazoned with the name of the prison and a wry image of a magnetic kitchen knife strip from which hang two kitchen knives, a carving fork, and a pair of handcuffs. The name of the cookbook is in Norwegian, but Høidal tells me with a chuckle that it translates as Honest Food from Halden Prison.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Here we not only use static security but also dynamic security,” he tells me. Static security is the traditional methodology of correctional facilities, made up of physical measures (high walls, alarm systems, bars) and also monitoring practices (cameras, observation, supervised visitation, cell and body searches, prisoner counts). Dynamic security, in contrast, is based in the interpersonal relationships and interactions between prisoners and prison employees. Høidal points to a prison officer and an inmate working together on a piece of furniture, the officer holding the base of a chair while the prisoner fits a leg onto it. “The relationship between staff and inmates is the most important part. “The prison officers and the prisoners are together all day,” Høidal explains. “Officers are in the workshops and in the living units, but everyone also eats meals together. They take leisure together. They do activities together.” In addition, 50 percent of the prison officers at Halden are female. And not one of them—male or female—is armed. “Knowing the inmates is the best security,” he continues. That way officers can be on alert if a man is behaving oddly—if he appears to be agitated or is becoming angry, they notice it, because they know that man. Know what it looks like when he is calm and know what it looks like when he begins to rev up.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Despite easy access to any number of items that could be used as weapons at Halden, aggression between inmates is rare. Violence enacted by prisoners against staff? “It’s nonexistent,” says Høidal. By which he means that they’ve not had even one incident in the six years since Halden opened. I ask Høidal why he thinks this is true, despite easy and near-constant access to potential weapons by men who’ve committed serious, often violent, crimes. To answer he returns to the intentions behind the relationship established between prison officers and inmates.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“A pineapple versus nutraloaf is a shocking comparison, not just for the radical difference in taste and nutrition but also for all that the food implies, and it serves as a perfect mechanism to underscore what the normality principle offers that a punitive stance does not. The pineapple in the shop must be purchased, cored, and cut. Nutraloaf is shoved through a trapdoor. Nutraloaf is not merely disgusting (though it certainly is that). It is also disempowering and infantilizing, and it enforces both a lack of responsibility and a lack of agency in the people to whom it is served.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“we buy our groceries. We cook dinner. We do the laundry. These are things we have to manage in our lives,” Warden Høidal reiterates. “It does not help anyone for these things to be done for them. “The normality principle,” he says, grinning at me as I scan the produce. “You are starting to understand!”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“However, even the annual state correctional costs that initially appear lower than Halden’s per-inmate budget belie a larger truth. Norway’s recidivism rate is now one of the lowest in the world. This means that even if short-term costs are greater at a place like Halden, which invests significant funds in staff numbers and training, the long-term costs of our recurrent incarcerations quickly multiply, rendering the American system—with one of the highest recidivism rates in the world—a far more expensive one.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“It’s easy to convince oneself that the facilities and guard-to-prisoner ratio at Halden would pose a financial differential insurmountable for American states. A closer look reveals that the reality is far more nuanced.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Warden Høidal and I walk outdoors on a winding path that leads us into a modern building that is one of the living units. It’s silent. During my visits to Northern, I’d made notes, trying to capture the feel of the place. Looking back through those notes, I saw that the noise was a theme to which I’d subconsciously returned over and over again. Floors, walls, ceilings all concrete. Doors are metal. Railings metal. There is nothing to absorb sound—it reverberates, echoes, expands. There is constant slamming. Whenever someone speaks to me, I have to strain to understand what they are saying. The staff that works here doesn’t seem to notice. From a second visit: Doors slam. There is yelling out. The walls are concrete and cinder block. It is cold, loud, jarring. Every noise echoes, a harsh reverberation. A third: The noise is unbelievable. I’m trying to think of the loudest places I’ve been. Concerts. Sporting events. Airfields. This is loud of a different quality. It jars. It obscures and obfuscates. I can’t hear what’s being said to me. There is yelling, but the words are indistinguishable. Or there is no yelling but inmates on their work duty from other facilities rumble carts”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Unsurprisingly, this expansion of the Norwegian officers’ responsibilities could not happen overnight. Just as the government’s directive had required a reenvisioning of the role, implementation of the new role required radically different job training. Before working in a prison, Norwegian officers are now required to attend a Staff Academy where they are not only taught security procedures but also take courses in psychology, criminology, law, human rights, and ethics. Completing the required training at the academy takes two years, during which time trainees are paid full salaries. As a measure of comparison, the average training program to become a correctional officer in the United States is nine weeks long.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Now only 20 percent of Norwegian prisoners are arrested in the two years after their release. In contrast, a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 44 percent of American state prisoners were arrested at least once in the first year after their release. Høidal attributes the Norwegian turnaround directly to the change in officers’ responsibilities. Each officer is designated as the “contact officer” for three inmates. The officer is assigned responsibility for these three inmates for the duration of their incarceration. “They’re like a coach, motivator, role model,” Høidal says of the contact officers. And “like a nurse when you’re in the hospital,” they are familiar with your case; they’re the person to whom you reach out first when you need something, whether that something is help in beginning a job, or classes in the prison, or finding housing or work in the community for the future.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“This small moment, mentioned by Warden Høidal in passing during a series of much longer and more detailed conversations, differentiates our system from that of others. It doesn’t work to meet hard with hard. Instead we will meet hard with soft. The focus is no longer on payback and retribution, on making the criminal suffer. Instead the focus is aligned with what will work, with what will reduce crime and diminish violence, with what will increase the safety of the communities and thus the nation.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“The Norwegian government, Høidal explains, “determined that we cannot just go on with hard [treatment of inmates]. It doesn’t work. We have to think in a total new way.” A decision was made—which later resulted in legislative change—to “meet hard behavior with soft treatment. To stop meeting hard with hard.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“The defining ethos of Halden Prison is that the principle of normality best prepares people to leave prison and return to their communities as functional members of society. A relentless and pragmatic focus on what happens after release drives the philosophy. You can’t expect someone who’s spent months or years sitting in a cell to then hop up in the morning, make his breakfast, and go to work all day the moment he’s released. Just as teenagers are armed with more independence and more responsibility before they move out of the family home, you must prepare a person for the transition out of prison and back into the responsibilities of the community if you want that transition to occur with any measure of success. And in order to do this, you must also be realistic about the significant obstacles that a man released from prison is facing: he’s been absent from all his relationships; he’ll suddenly have financial obligations like rent and groceries and child support; he’ll need to find counseling and likely substance-abuse programs.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Not too many years ago, things were much worse,” Høidal confirms, which led to an edict from the country’s highest powers. “The government, the politicians said to the justice department, ‘Do something. It cannot go on like this. It has to stop.’” So in 1995 the Norwegian justice department created work groups to develop a plan to address the dysfunction and danger in their system of corrections. The principle of normality is a core part of the new perspective that emerged, and it requires that life inside the prison should resemble life outside the prison as much as possible. Thus inmates do not lose any rights other than their right to liberty while they’re incarcerated. This is not just a tenet of Norwegian law. It is also stipulated in international conventions about imprisonment, including the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners—known as the Mandela Rules in honor of Nelson Mandela—which state that “the prison regimen should seek to minimize any differences between prison life and life at liberty that tend to lessen the responsibility of the prisoners or the respect due to their dignity as human beings.” “So while he is here with us,” Høidal explains, “other than the fact that he cannot leave here whenever he wants to, the inmate has all the same rights as all other citizens who live in Norway.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“mention to Høidal that the buildings at his facility look unlike any prison I’ve ever seen. “For the architects a reduced feeling of being in a high-security prison was also a priority,” he explains. “It should not look like a prison. That was very important.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“We seem to be driving through a park when Høidal suddenly announces, “Here we are, then,” and gestures toward a series of attractive buildings through which he’ll walk me later in the day. I ask about the prison’s location and the parklike grounds, and he tells me that the architects who designed Halden Prison thought it was very important to keep the men close to nature, to ensure that the inmates did not lose connection with the natural world.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“As soon as someone is sentenced in Sweden, a needs assessment is performed. The idea of such an assessment is to identify gaps—to diagnose the deficiencies in a person’s life that might have led him to engage in criminal behavior,”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Our methods of punishment harm prisoners, serving and satisfying our reflexive fury in the short term. But once these harmed men and women return to our cities, to our port authorities, and to our neighborhoods, our methods of punishment prove in the long run to harm us all.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“I have come to believe that we want both things: safer, just communities and also revenge. But those desires are mutually exclusive. And so, despite countless studies demonstrating that our current prison practices are inefficient, expensive, ineffective, and inhumane, we are not jolted into action because we’re unwilling to relinquish our desire for vengeance.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Extreme sentencing brings out the worst in us as a society. Our punitive policies—undergirded by injustice and illogic—have resulted in an overcrowded federal prison system in which nearly half the people held within are serving time not for violent crimes but for drug offenses. When we implement sweeping policies that punish with consequences that endure long after sentences have been served; when we reduce punishment to the unthinking algorithms of mandatory minimums that remove any possibility for mitigation or acknowledgment of individual circumstance, let alone compassion; when we develop punishments that ostensibly target criminal behavior but instead devastate lives, families, and communities, we allow anger to reign over reason and we prioritize revenge over safety and justice.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“In order to reduce criminal behavior, we must build responsibility and routine as opposed to eliminating it. We must enhance job training and reduce obstacles to employment once prison sentences are done. We must foster connections with family and support networks even during periods of incarceration rather than creating barriers to these connections. These are ex ante solutions that reduce crime in the long run.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“But if suffering is not our goal, if in fact we do desire safer communities and justice above all else, then we must look at a different uncomfortable truth. There are established methods of reducing crime with fairness, but those methods are not our methods. They are not our ways.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“In the name of safety and punishment, prison constraints prevent incarcerated men and women from becoming more educated, more skilled, more whole. In addition, the constraints render people less apt to reintegrate into our communities in productive, law-abiding ways. Detainees who participate in educational classes while incarcerated have a 13 percent higher chance of getting a job once they leave prison. More strikingly, they’re half as likely to break the law again. Yet two-thirds of American prisons have no means for detainees to take educational classes beyond the high school level.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“More than one out of every eight Black men in America is ineligible to vote, and that number is increasing rather than decreasing.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Some people may argue here, what right do prisoners have to anything beyond basic nutrition? But this is the wrong question. The relevant question is, what do we accomplish by serving nutraloaf? We shame the men and women who receive it, certainly. We cause them to suffer. Perhaps Sheriff Clarke is correct that the fear of it improves prison discipline in the short term. If these are our only goals—shame, vengeance, and control—then the loaf may well serve these purposes.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration