Humane Corrections to Pennsylvania State Incarceration Offer New Hope

(The Center Square) - The quality of life afforded the state’s prisoners is a perennial concern for families, human rights advocates and workers within the judicial system, including the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections itself. For the nearly 40,000 incarcerated Pennsylvanians, new approaches to corrections could make a big difference in their experience. For some, they already are. A program at SCI Chester called Little Scandinavia adopts principles from the prison model used in Sweden and Norway to lessen the disparity between life in prison and life in the real world. Residents of this unit, which can house up to 64 men, live in single cells where they have desks and even refrigerators.