Abby Cunniff on the Nordic distraction: we need prison closures, abolition, and care

Editor’s note: This story written by Abby Cunniff and Ruth Wilson Gilmore was originally published in Prism on September 26th, 2024. 

Despite the recommendation of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) that California should close at least five prisons, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has instead proposed renovating the state’s oldest facility—the one former Gov. Jerry Brown planned to shutter in his first term as governor. Newsom claims the $240 million project, dubbed “The California Model,” will address the state’s long-standing mistreatment of incarcerated people—mistreatment so deep that the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 the state could not build its way out of a system where medical neglect caused an average of one preventable death per week, every week, for years.

Since the Supreme Court ruling, the state’s incarcerated population has declined dramatically, with no complementary expansion in jails. Lurid claims of surging crime have been thoroughly debunked. We challenge the reasoning behind Newsom’s expansion and stand with the LAO: California should be closing prisons and figuring out all the ways to decarcerate people still locked up. By contrast, the so-called California model, with new names and frills, is a repetition of every single prison expansion or enhancement since San Quentin opened in 1852. Every new prison purported to solve the problems produced by earlier prisons. We should know by now that the problem is prison, even a Nordic version.

The prison junketeers who swan off to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway from California, New York, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Connecticut, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington to gush over humane prisons conveniently ignore major facts. 

First, the Nordic prisons are one small element of a widespread social welfare state rather than the catch-all solution to such a state’s failure. These junketeers ignore the extra-prison protections and opportunities that extend throughout the society—not as a “safety net,” but as the infrastructure of well-being. 

Secondly, the rise of the far right in Nordic countries has gone hand-in-hand with increased criminalization of immigrants and their families. As a result, the Nordic social welfare infrastructure has dissolved considerably, and prisons are crammed full of people of color. Those who have been criminalized and incarcerated in Nordic prisons commit suicide 64% more often than the rest of European prisons, in part because of the Nordic model’s reliance on solitary confinement—torture, according to the United Nations. In other words, with the racist-fueled decline of social infrastructure, the Nordic prisons are rapidly becoming used the ways U.S. prisons and jails are used: extracting time from vulnerable lives.

The political architecture of the Nordic model is held together by political philanthropies and social change actors willing to hawk their prison spending campaign. Backers for the California Model include Arnold Ventures, an LLC that uses oil and gas money to fight unions and expand jail systems. Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Open Society foundations also play a critical role in funding carceral nonprofits, like the University of California San Francisco’s Amend and Amity Foundation, which advocate for reforms for carceral expansion to manage popular dissent and steer the public gaze away from prison abolition. Social change actors like those leading the San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council use foundation money to promote solutions not designed to reduce the size or scope of the carceral system, but instead to augment the physical design of prisons and prison guard training. Newsom and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) are beneficiaries of this prison boosting effort, as more state money in correctional budgets keeps their political alliances and domain intact. 

So, what do we want instead? 

For nearly half a century, spending priorities in California, the world’s fifth largest economy, have ignored how the state got here. Workers and their families, in factories, fields, and service jobs, built the Golden State. We want public goods to be universal entitlements. The number of people locked up has drastically declined and will continue to fall. Those who are still inside should have excellent health care, education, and living conditions while becoming eligible for release sooner. Not a single new building needs to be built for this to happen. Things don’t fix things; people do. Documentary filmmaker Adamu Chan has illuminated the demands of incarcerated people inside San Quentin, which are demands for people to get out, get well, and thrive. The demands are not for new prisons or “normalization.” 

When it comes to deciding the fate of the California prison system, long-term organizing by abolitionists and momentum from the 2020 uprisings has broken the grip of the powerful lobby for prison guards, the CCPOA, and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. On the cusp of closures and budgetary reductions, this network of prison boosters seeks to divert our attention with questionable philosophies, flashy graphics, and public relations aimed at convincing us that we don’t need to close prisons; we simply need to reshape them and make them really work this time. 

We know better. 

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. Prism reports from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.