The case of the Menendez brothers: Erik and Lyle Menendez built a green space in the prison. It is modeled on this Norwegian idea

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

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

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

The entire country has about 3,000 people in prison, he said, putting Norway’s incarceration rate per capita at about one-tenth that of the United States.

Norway has some of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. Government statistics show that the proportion of people re-sentenced within two years of release in 2020 is 16%, with the figure falling each year. Meanwhile, a decade-long survey by the US Department of Justice found that 66 percent of people released from state prisons in 24 states were rearrested within three years, and most of those were rearrested .

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

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

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 beautifully situated in the Oslo Fjord,” Mjland said.

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

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

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

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

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

Their attorney and the LA District Attorney argued that they had served enough time, citing evidence that they suffered physical and sexual abuse from their entertainment executive father. They also say the brothers, now in their 50s, are model prisoners who are committed to rehabilitation and redemption.

Both point to the brothers’ years of efforts to improve the San Diego prison where they 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 beautification program, Green Space, at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center. His brother, Erik Menendez, is the lead painter for a massive mural depicting San Diego landmarks.

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

The Menendez brothers’ work is ongoing, with the ultimate goal of transforming the prison yard “from an oppressive slab of concrete and gravel into a normalized, park-like campus setting surrounded by a majestic mural,” according to the prison’s website 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 bringing similar projects across the state to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education and reentry,” Calderón Michel wrote.

The brothers’ attorney, Mark Geragos, said he believes Lyle Menendez learned about the Norwegian model during college. 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 make re-entry into society easier for people on parole.

“When you’re out there in a gray space that’s not very welcoming, it’s disorienting to some degree,” Geragos told The Associated Press on Friday. “And you also have the problem of the terrain not being something welcoming or helpful in terms of acclimating and re-acclimating into a community.”

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Dominique Moran, a professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK, said he found in his research that introducing green spaces into prisons improves the well-being of inmates as well as corrections staff.

“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence and 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 punishment in itself,” she said. “There should be no additional punishment by the nature of the environment in which people are held.”

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