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COPENHAGEN (AP) — Nearly 30 years after killing their parents, Erik and Lyle Menendez have launched a project to beautify the California prison where they are serving life sentences.

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Their project draws inspiration from the Norwegian approach to incarceration, whereby rehabilitation in humane 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 (1,750 kilometers) from north to south. It has created small prisons across the country, allowing people to serve their sentences close to home, said Kristian Mjåland, a Norwegian associate professor of sociology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.

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

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

Mjåland said Norway’s incarceration system is based on the principles that people should be “treated decently by well-trained and decent staff” and given “opportunities to carry out meaningful activities during the day” – which he called it the “principle of normality” – and that they should retain their fundamental rights.

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Mjåland, whose research has focused on punishment and prisons, said that, for example, prisoners in Norway retain the right to vote and access services such as libraries, health care and education delivered by the same providers working 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 the island of Bastoey, “which is very beautifully located in the Oslofjord,” Mjåland said.

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

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

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

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

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

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Their lawyer and the Los Angeles district attorney argued they had 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 are committed to rehabilitation and redemption.

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

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

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“This project hopes to normalize the environment inside the prison to reflect the living environment outside the prison,” Pedro Calderon Michel, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Justice, told the AP on Friday. correctional and rehabilitation services.

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

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 launching similar projects across the state to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education and reentry,” Calderon wrote Michael.

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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 has studied urban planning and recidivism, and Geragos said his client hopes the beautification will make it easier for those on parole to reenter 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 you also have the problem that terrain is not something that is welcoming or helpful in terms of acclimation and re-acclimation in a community.”

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

“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence, as well as 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, according to the Scandinavian approach, “people go to prison AS punishment, not FOR additional punishment.”

“Deprivation of liberty is in itself a punishment,” she said. “There should be no additional sanctions due to the nature of the environment in which people are detained. »

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