Halden Prison
Just outside Norway lies Halden Prison, the Norwegian prison that claims its’ fame as the most humane prison in Europe. Opened on April 8th, 2010, Halden’s architecture resembles a college campus more than it does the prototypical prison. While its’ award-winning design has been criticized for being too liberal, Halden has some of the lowest rates of inmate violence in the world despite being a maximum-security facility.
It’s architecture has separate wards in different buildings, so that if inmates have visitors, or have an activity, walking through nature is built into their daily schedule. This, along with the prison’s spread -across 75 acres- with a maximum capacity of approximately 250, offers inmates the opportunity to gain alone time whilst avoiding isolation. The rooms themselves, what would be an inmate’s cell- are all private rooms that contain one flat screen T.V., a comfortable bed and vertical windows that face nature, allowing for natural light. In fact, the comfort level of the prison has left some affronted who insist that there is something fundamentally unethical about providing criminals with a quality lifestyle. That stated, Halden’s creators advocate that ‘the architecture should not be punishment, imprisonment is the punishment’. Furthermore, Norway’s king, Harald V., who opened the facility protests that the intent of the design is to prepare inmates for life outside the prison. Thus, by emulating civilization, the inmates are being prepared for life after release, with intentions of reducing recidivism. With regards to its’ intents and in view of the reduced rates of in prison crime, using empathy to create spaces may be one of the most radical innovations in crime reduction —with the potential of decreasing future victims, and increasing societal wellbeing.
What is meant by empathic spaces?
Empathic from the word ‘empathy’ which is defined as:
“1. the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another of either the past or present without having feelings, thoughts and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.
also: the capacity for this
2. the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.”
— Merriam-Webster dictionary
The discussion of empathic spaces entails the latter definition in which the space empathizes with the needs of those they contain. They are created mindfully, with an intention to communicate a denoted need; in the case of Halden that need is—in parsimony—wellness. Thus, empathic spaces can be defined as architectural, city or spatial designs made with the intention of meeting the emotional needs of those it was designed for.
Why do we need empathic spaces?
Colloquially, when one thinks of empathy, one may think of the human tendency to mirror or mimic those we care for. This is done intuitively by matching the other’s body language such as facial expressions, tone of voice, word selection and gestures. This is surface-level empathy, as mimicry does not necessarily equate to a deeper level of affect contagion. The failure to receive mimicry and affective empathy results in connectivity trauma and disconnection.
In an ideal world such empathy exists between parents and their offspring, a necessity in the formation of secure attachment. In an ideal world we also mirror, to some degree, our neighbours in the formation of community, but this doesn’t always happen. If we don’t experience mirroring during our formative years for reasons that are incredibly complex and wildly debated —intergenerational trauma, harsh environmental conditions and quality of life, and neurobiological differences—we face insecure attachment and developmental trauma. When trauma is forced on groups of people which severs their capacity to empathize we damage their nervous systems and apathy becomes prolific. The sad notion of this is that the research into emotional lability finds that those with the greatest capacity to empathize and feel are the ones who become the most volatile under hostile conditions and in efforts to detach to reduce further harm to oneself, they or should I say ‘we’ become the most emotionally numb. So to consider justice from a perspective of reducing recidivism requires an grasp on the environmental factors that elicit and maintain an optimal window of empathy.
Empathy’s empirical definition is based on the diversity of its’ folk psychological uses which can confuse even the wisest and most intelligent of people who aren’t detrimentally obsessed with it. There is affective empathy, cognitive empathy and compassion. Time for another ADHD tangent! Compassion is not, in my less than humble opinion, a form of empathy, it is more complex than that. Compassion has three subtypes that depend on empathy: compassionate pity, compassionate empathy and expansive compassion. Empathy isn’t necessarily even an emotion, as much as it is a state of being or mood, like depression, in which one is able to fluidly and accurate connect with, assess and experience the emotions of oneself and others.
Compassionate pity- which is to cognitively assess the suffering or experiences of others and have elicited sorrow and suffering for their assumed pain because the cognitive assessment of their suffering does not have to be accurate compassionate pity can be toxic and pathological.
Compassionate empathy- is when one uses affective empathy to denote the experiences of others and cognitive empathy both inwardly and outwardly to respond to suffering. This is what is needed to address criminality.
Expansive compassion- When compassionate empathy occurs on a greater scale because it is met with emotional contagion and spreads. This form of expansive compassion is hypothetical.
While research into attachment trauma is still a relatively new subject in the social sciences, positive correlations are found between insecure attachment style, criminality, and anti-social behaviours. This suggests asserts that early and continuous trauma is influential to criminality as the perpetuation of apathy results in empathetic numbness. This in which I wittily labelled the “empathic-to-apathy-paradox”- shortly, it is too costly to practice empathy to those who fail to show it: the result of this is numbness, bitterness, betrayal, confusion, loathing and full out shock. It is the swing from expansive compassion to volatility and finally to empathic numbness. For the empath, the experience of empathic numbness does not come without fury because we are fighting for the survival of our identifying features and need to connect against a cultural body that fails demonstrate any amount of empathy. To understand this more fully, empathic numbness is a form of apathy when a highly empathic person can no longer care for others and it differs from the deepest extent of apathy which is alexithymia (emotional blindness) combined with a lack of caring. We, who promote abuse as punishment, like to tell ourselves that those in prison are the latter and to the greatest degree. Some of them are, but the majority are the preceding.
I crossed out suggests and replaced it with asserts because I am getting tired of humility. In order to understand why this correlation is an assertion and not a suggestion requires a deep understanding of the demographics that are incarcerated and the injustices that they faced.
Thirty percent of Canada’s prison population is indigenous. I have so much to say about this, but I’m still frozen by the weight of that. Developmental trauma or childhood trauma, in which developing nervous systems are exposed to continuous overwhelm that phenotypical expressions change, as grief cannot be processed because the shock is too much, and the space and validation is not available. Furthermore, if the significant traumas happen at a very young age and continue, the structure of the central nervous system literally changes.
Just as in-utero teratogen exposure changes neuronal migration, teratogen exposure in the form of chronic, traumatizing stress changes brain structure. While these changes were believed to be permanent and might very well be, the 21st centuries’ discovery of neuroplasticity offers hope for rehabilitation. That stated, one cannot rehabilitate under the same circumstances that resulted in the preliminary injury.
So while it is not uncommon and understandable to want to assert control and dominance over those that have hurt you–catharsis, one needs to look at who is being punished and who is not before assuming catharsis is synonymous with justice.
I share some of a friend of mine’s story of incarceration for theft, and all I can think about is the fact that he was stolen from his family and his culture. Yes, I have been someone who has been victimized by theft, but there is a difference between being stolen from by a person whose sense of entitlement, sociopathic apathy, and grandiosity makes them feel like they can do whatever ever they want and can get away with it and a traumatized person who has learned that the outside world is apathetic so it is too dangerous to connect with it and so diminish their sense of worthiness. In these circumstances, whatever they do doesn’t matter because they do not matter. This is their learned cognitive distortion which requires healing. Worth is not reestablished and processed in an environment designed to degrade humans.
We like to believe in the just-world-phenomenon: in which those that are punished are punished rightfully and effective while those that are socially awarded with wealth, status and power are rightfully awarded. However, maintaining this fantastical viewpoint of the world requires a certain amount of cruelty, entitlement and ignorance. It is the basis of the eugenics movement and selectively searches for the five percent of supporting evidence in ignorance of ninety-five percent of opposing evidence.
The last I read, twin studies found anti-social personality disorder were about 60% genetics and 40% environment. As I read on, I was surprised to understand what was meant by this. This was not about environment triggering gene expression. This was that some people just had genetic traits that, regardless of environment lead to dark triad qualities and that 40% of people where traumatized into anti-social behaviours.
What is even more interesting is that the majority of those with genetic traits leading to anti-socialism were not the majority of those incarcerated, they are often at the top of the hierarchy because they are good at scheming, blaming, conniving, convincing and deflecting to the point of not only self-preservation but at the expense of those that they utilize. The population that is incarcerated tend to come form disadvantaged circumstances which has lead to empathic numbing and fury which again cannot be healed in an environment that perpetuates the mindset which resulted in their condemnation.
Being traumatized is a punishment so great those who are free from that suffering with mediocre levels of empathy do not understand it; those who are high in empathy struggle to bear witness to it and so are propelled to heal it, but without supportive spaces for that task, the mission is almost impossible because witnessing the trivialities of the world requires recuperation. It is easier to understand that the person who works in healing should have a comfortable quality of life for the work that they do serving the greater good of society and to be able to continue with that work. As a yoga teacher, one of the most valid complaints that I know is that is that maintaining the work when the cost of our labour does not meet our basic needs is induces burnout and apathy. What we ignore is that those who are healing themselves from a lifetime of trauma also require that same degree of comfort.
Where does apathy stem from?
I cannot say were sociopathic apathy stems from, but I have speculated. Apathy has always endorsed rewards. It seems like there is a lack of critical thinking, like insisting that animals don’t have language because their forms of communication lack the definition we invented for language such as having to have syntactic structure and using this to justify them being lesser beings to escape from the pain of having to take a life with false moral superiority. We come up with ways to dehumanize and depersonalize others to perpetuate our own growth. This growth can be the growth of our physical bodies and necessities for survival, but it can extend to gluttony.
Apathy is endorsed by a system of reward associated with threat and equating supremacy with survival, ignoring that if supremacy relies on the obliteration and extortion of other people, which means an awakened proletariot is a dangerous one. So, they must falsy believe that all of them, with hard work and dedication are afforded the same opportunities to socially escalate and discriminatory myths about groups of people being lesser than are perpetuated. To inform you, I, the author, am by some definitions a retard because the need I have to multi-sensorily process information makes certain environments over stimulating, so despite being able to explain these ideas to you, the reader, if you were never given the opportunity to read them, you too would believe the myth that I am intellectually inferior to you. But it is this myth, and the hopes and rewards for believing in it makes it sustainable. The reality of our social systems is that it is not founded justice, it is founded on the illusion of it by the apethic reduction of other people.
When I think about this, I agree with Fluttershy, I’d like to be a tree. Something non-mammalian that does not require overt suffering in order to survive.
And yet, supremacy is not the only option! There are cultures, that I need to learn more about, that allow for the complexity of grief to exist alongside the necessities for survival. Sapolski’s research on Baboons supports this, cultures can form in which support and empathy are ingrained into their way of life, when they are not being abused by those who apathetically engage in machiavellianism. However, his observations found that it was their greed that led to their sudden death and the protection of the kinder. In our reality these covert bullies seek people out who, due to good qualities, are also easy targets and then use the just-world-phenomenon and our naivety regarding the detriments of empathy to maintain their power. When I realized this, my scores on Kauffman’s light triad decreased. It is not only naive to believe in the absolute goodness of humanity it is gaslighting by denying the very real atrocities and exploitations done by humanity.
There is a truth too about empathy, it needs to be directed both inwards and outwards and by all people in order for it to be balanced and in a world out of balance it can become increasingly painful to participate because we need to attune to the dialogue between ourselves and environment and if the whole environment is painful, we bear that pain.
Outside of prison there are environmental resources for soothing if we have the liberty and autonomy to access them, the feel of sun, wind and water, the smell of nature, the healers we encounter and these may offer a few moments of relief and for some may spur spontaneous healing. The most empathic people when resourced are the ones most prone to post traumatic growth. But what if you cannot access an environment that meets your needs?
What happens when there is a lack of empathic spaces?
The ‘Rat Park’, a well-known experiment conducted by Bruce K. Alexander and colleagues between 1978-1981, found that when rats were placed in two conditions, one which had idyllic living conditions and another which was overcrowded and sparse of stimuli, rats when given access to opiates would develop an addiction almost restrictively in the impoverished condition with overcrowding. The parallel between overcrowded rats and addiction and overcrowded prisons and prison crime is uncanny. The models of most prisons facilitates regular interactions because the different wards are comprised long hallways which merge in a central meeting space, or the wards in-box a common courtyard which acts as the inmates only green-space. These spaces are cold and disconnected from time and location, a predecessor found to lead to delirium.
Punishment for bad behaviour, which the spaces not only allotted for but arguably provoke include solitary confinement which can trigger mental illnesses and delirium, which again impact crime rates, but more importantly, the capacity to rehabilitate. The relationship becomes cyclical.
Hopes for the Future
Las Colinas Women’s Detention Center in San Diego offers hope for North America. It is the first location to use compassionate design, in which the layout attempts to acknowledge the humanity of its’ inmates and offer a baseline of comfort.
My hope for the future is that more research will be done into the impacts of spaces and wellbeing with specificity to how colour, shapes and design with respects to architecture and interior fashion impacts the central nervous system.
Further Research Areas
- Research is needed to assess long-term savings through estimated decreases in recidivism.
- Research is needed on the impacts of design on wellbeing.
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*Mother-blaming: is a term created to call out the psychological community for its’ role in blaming mothers for differences in abnormal development without acknowledgement or reflection on the struggles that mothers experience due to sociological factors such as access to resources, misogyny, cultural genocides and systemic abuse.
I used the term ‘mother-blaming’ before ‘parent-blaming’ to acknowledge a history that essentially placed all child-rearing responsibility on biologically female presenting people.
kind movement. Compassionate mind. Empathic research. 