Case of the Menendez Brothers: Erik and Lyle Menendez built a green space in the prison. It’s modeled after this Norwegian idea

COPENHAGEN — Nearly thirty years after killing their parents, Erik and Lyle Menendez launched a beautification project at the California prison where they are serving life sentences.

Their project is inspired by the Norwegian approach to incarceration, which assumes that 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 set up small prisons across the country, allowing people to serve their sentences close to home, said Kristian Mjland, 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, making Norway’s per capita incarceration rate about one-tenth that of the United States.

Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. Government statistics show that the percentage of people re-sentenced within two years of their release in 2020 is 16%, with this figure falling every year. Meanwhile, a U.S. Department of Justice study conducted over the past decade found that 66% of people released from state prisons in 24 states were rearrested within three years, and most of them were reincarcerated.

Mjland said Norway’s incarceration 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 normality” – and that they must preserve their fundamental rights.

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

Norway also has open prisons, some on islands where a lot of agricultural work and contact with nature takes place. The best known is on the island of Bastoey, “which is very beautifully situated in the Oslofjord,” Mjland said.

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

The idea of ​​creating normal, humane conditions for people in prison is also beginning to spread in the US.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for example, has tried to adopt some elements of the Scandinavian approach in recent years, unveiling a program it calls “Little Scandinavia” at a prison in Chester in 2022.

The Menendez brothers’ case was in the public spotlight again Thursday when the Los Angeles County district attorney recommended that their life sentences be dismissed. Prosecutors hope a judge will convict 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 have served enough time, citing evidence that they were physically and sexually abused by their entertainment executive father. They also say the brothers, now in their 50s, are model prisoners who have worked for rehabilitation and redemption.

Both point to the brothers’ years-long efforts to improve the San Diego prison, where they lived for six years. Before that, the two had been in separate prisons since 1996.

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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 of a huge mural of San Diego landmarks.

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

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

The end product includes outdoor classrooms, meeting areas for rehabilitation groups and training areas for guide 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,” Calderón Michel wrote.

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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 in a master’s program studying urban planning and recidivism. Geragos said his client hopes the beautification will make reintroduction into society easier for people on parole.

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

Dominique Moran, a professor at the University of Birmingham in Britain, said she has found in her research that introducing green spaces into prisons improves the well-being of both prisoners and prison staff.

“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence, as well as staff illness,” says Moran, author of “Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration.”

Moran has studied prisons around the world and said in an emailed statement that the Scandinavian approach “people go to prison as punishment, not FOR further punishment.”

“The deprivation of liberty is itself the punishment,” she said. “There should be no further punishment due to the nature of the environment in which people are being held.”

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