Shaping Nordic punishment Penal exceptionalism and the correctional revolution at Ringe Prison in the 1970s

Peter Fransen and Peter Scharff Smith

Introduction In 1974 the planning of a new Danish high-security prison outside of Ringe, on the island Funen, was well underway and the construction committee pulling the strings authored an internal note on the process and the future plans. Under the heading ‘Basic principles’ the committee declared that the coming prison ‘should be run with the greatest possible co-influence from officers as well as prisoners’.1 In this spirit the already appointed governor, Erik Andersen, planned to use his prison staff in a novel manner in order to create a new kind of relational work between officers and prisoners. To achieve this Andersen chose, and was granted the authority to proceed with, a radical approach in the sense that he wanted to staff his prison primarily with officers who had no previous experience working in prisons (Andersen, 1977, p. 125.). A clear and conscious attempt to break with the path dependency (as coined by Douglas North) of an otherwise very historically rooted Danish prison estate (Smith, 2003).