Mr Rosen goes to Germany

In 2015 he visited Germany with a group of fellow Americans which included a governor, another district attorney, several prominent academics, and a convicted murderer from Detroit who spent seven years in solitary confinement.  Following his visit he produced a very illuminating TED talk reflecting on history, prisons and human rights.

Visiting Germany was a profoundly emotional experience for Jeff Rosen. As a child he asked his father why his family didn’t have a dog, when the neighbourhood was full of children playing with their dogs. His father replied, “Because they used ‘Hunds’ on us”. This was a reference that the Nazis used dogs to attack and intimidate his family, his father and grandmother, during the three years that they spent in Nazi concentration camps.

Prisons

German prisons are very different from American prisons, and from those in England, Wales and Scotland. For one thing, they are very much smaller. The largest prison in Germany is Tegel Prison, in Berlin with 1,200 inmates. Most German prisons are much smaller. They have 300 to 500 inmates in them.

By contrast, American prisons are very large. The largest, Rikers Island in New York, has over 14,000 inmates. Angola State Prison, in Louisiana, has more than 5,000 inmates. In California, San Quentin has 3,500 inmates.

In the UK our prisons are large, although not as huge as those in the US. Oakwood has 2,042 inmates, Berwyn in Wales has 1,804, there are 1600 in Parc, also in Wales, and 1,408 in Barlinnie in Scotland.

Secondly, German prisoners wear their own clothes from the start of detention. Wearing their own clothes is not a privilege for those who are judged to have earned it. They cook their own meals, and they have great freedom of movement within the prison. By contrast, American prisoners wear identical uniforms, are confined in their cells for most of the day, and eat meals in large cafeterias.

German prisoners have their own cell, a telephone in it, and their own kind of toilet, as well. The group visited Heidering, a prison built in 2013. Outside there is barbed wire; it looks like a prison. Once inside it’s very unlike a prison in the US or the UK.

It’s immaculately clean, it’s full of natural light with huge windows, and with balconies where inmates can go to sit out in the fresh air. A typical cell is large, about 9.3 square meters, with only one person is in each cell.

How many are sent to prison?

It is well known that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In fact, California is one of 16 states where there are more people in prison than there are in college.

Germany has a low incarceration rate. The number of prisoners per 100,000 of the population is 655 in the US; 133 in England and Wales; 71 in Germany.

Trends

From 1925 to 1975, during that 50-year period, the incarceration rate in the US stayed at a stable figure of about 100 per 100,000. From the mid 1970s until today, the incarceration rate shot up to where it is now, at around 700 per 100,000, in a sevenfold, 700 per cent increase.

Human rights

The Constitution in Germany was written in 1949 while Germany was occupied by the United States, Britain and France, after World War II. This was in the shadow of the Holocaust and the horror inflicted by the Nazi government. In the new constitution the primary principle was “respect human dignity”. Their prison system reflects this.

Article 1 of the German Constitution states: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” This, the first principle in the German Constitution, has been cited by the German Supreme Court establishing that inmates are held in one person per cell, no solitary confinement, no death penalty, everyone is eligible for parole.

Lessons for us

There is much to learn from Germany. It has a far lower incarceration rate than we do in the UK. It has a progressive prison system built on a founding principle of respect for the dignity of inmates. Its prisons are clean, spacious, light-filled and staffed by well-trained staff (entry to the profession is competitive and those who succeed have two years of training).

Having visited German prisons Jeff Rosen made a journey to Bergen-Belsen the concentration camp in which his father and grandmother were held from January 1945 until 15 April 1945.

He concludes:

What I learned from visiting gleaming prisons, talking to correctional officers and convicted criminals, and then walking through a quiet field of mass graves is that the world might be broken but it can be repaired, because we’re all created with human dignity.

Rona Epstein is Honorary Research Fellow, Coventry Law School, Coventry University