Reform Models & Programs

The Rehabilitation Void: What Georgia Spends vs. What It Delivers

Georgia's Department of Corrections budget has grown from approximately $1.12 billion in FY2022 to $1,778,839,635 in FY2027 — a trajectory driven not by programmatic investment but by crisis spending on facilities, staffing bonuses, and security measures (GDC Mission vs. Reality; Fiscal Impact of Post-Conviction Reform in Georgia; FY2027 GDC Approved Budget). Between January and May 2025, the General Assembly approved $634 million in new corrections spending — the largest single corrections funding increase in state history — yet there is no public accounting of how much of that investment reached rehabilitation programs, education, or reentry services (Georgia's $600 Million Prison Spending Infusion). The FY2027 approved budget of $1,770,903,120 in state funds includes only $8,641,839 from the Opioid Settlement Trust Fund as a nominally new funding stream, and even that represents a shift from general funds rather than new investment (FY2027 GDC Approved Budget).

The result is a system in which 95% of incarcerated people will eventually be released — approximately 14,000–16,000 from Georgia prisons each year — having received almost no programming, job training, or reentry support (National Prison Reform Models & Georgia Comparison — Brennan Center 2026 Report; Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia). As columnist Steven Greenhut framed the public safety logic: "If someone from San Quentin moved into your neighborhood, would you want that person to have spent the past 10 years" warehoused or rehabilitated? Georgia's official three-year felony reconviction rate of 25–27% appears comparatively low, but that figure masks the 528,000 Georgia residents under total criminal justice supervision and the 191,000 on felony probation — the largest such population in the nation — suggesting the system recycles people through supervision rather than rehabilitating them (Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia; Georgia Probation & Community Supervision). The contrast with states that have invested in evidence-based programming is stark: where Georgia warehouses, other systems have rebuilt.

What Works: Evidence-Based Models Georgia Has Not Adopted

The national evidence base for rehabilitation programming is no longer speculative — it is voluminous. Cognitive-behavioral interventions like Thinking for a Change (T4C), developed by the National Institute of Corrections, show a recidivism rate of 23% among participants versus 36% in control groups during six-month follow-up evaluations — a statistically significant reduction achievable at low per-participant cost (Evidence-Based Rehabilitation Curricula). Trauma-informed care frameworks, Moral Reconation Therapy, and structured mentorship pipelines have all produced measurable outcomes in systems that have committed to implementation with fidelity. The critical variable is not the curriculum itself but whether the institutional infrastructure — dedicated housing units, trained facilitators, continuity of enrollment — exists to deliver it.

California's CDCR, operating under court-mandated reform following Brown v. Plata, built an Innovative Programming Grants (IPG) structure that has funded 299 programs since 2014, with the current 2025–2028 cycle providing $12 million over three years (California Prison Programs). Texas' Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) invites over 6,000 men across 80 TDCJ units annually into a fixed-cohort leadership curriculum (Prison Program Structure Models). New York's Bard Prison Initiative enrolls 400 students full-time across seven prisons. San Francisco's RSVP program operates with 44 inmates in a dedicated housing unit, using longer-tenured participants as mentors for incoming participants — a structural approach that creates accountability incentives and social capital simultaneously (Prison Program Structure Models). What these models share is intentional structural design: dedicated space, trained staff, and continuity of enrollment that Georgia's system does not replicate at meaningful scale.

The Nordic Model in American Practice: Pennsylvania's Little Scandinavia and California's San Quentin

The most ambitious current experiment in Nordic-inspired American prison reform is unfolding simultaneously at two very different scales — a 64-bed pilot unit outside Philadelphia and a $239 million state-flagship redesign in California — with results and controversies that illuminate both the promise and the limits of transplanting Scandinavian correctional philosophy into American institutional soil.

Pennsylvania: The Little Scandinavia Pilot at SCI Chester

The "Little Scandinavia" unit at State Correctional Institution-Chester (SCI Chester) — a 1,175-bed medium-security prison outside Philadelphia opened in 1998 — is the product of a formal three-way partnership between the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Drexel University, and the University of Oslo, developed through the Scandinavian Prison Project (SPP). The SPP is co-led by Jordan M. Hyatt, JD, PhD, Associate Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies and Director of the Center for Public Policy at Drexel University, and Synøve Nygaard Andersen of the University of Oslo, and is funded by Arnold Ventures. International institutional partners include the Norwegian Correctional Service (Kriminalomsorgen), the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården), and the Danish Prison and Probation Service.

The unit's development followed a deliberate timeline. In 2017, Drexel facilitated an initial Norwegian Correctional Service visit to SCI Chester, during which Are Høidal — former governor of Halden Prison, the facility widely considered the leading example of Scandinavian rehabilitative prison architecture since its opening in 2009 — visited the facility. Høidal now serves on the SPP advisory board. In 2018, the Pennsylvania DOC began its formal partnership with Drexel and Oslo. In summer 2019, SCI Chester correctional officers traveled to Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish prisons to observe practices firsthand — a staff investment that proved critical to subsequent buy-in. The unit opened in pilot form in March 2020 with six men serving life sentences moving in as mentors to younger incarcerated people; COVID-19 temporarily halted the project. On May 5, 2022, the unit was officially dedicated by then-Acting Secretary George Little alongside Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish correctional partners. In April 2023, Pennsylvania DOC Secretary Laurel Harry joined Hyatt and SCI Chester staff on a refresher trip to Swedish correctional facilities.

The physical unit itself was renovated from a standard 64-cell first-floor block that had previously held 128 men in shared cells. Following renovation, it now houses up to 64 men in single-occupancy cells — a deliberate reduction in density that is itself a structural intervention. The common area includes modular furniture, a treadmill, an elliptical machine, ceiling noise dampeners, potted plants, a large fish tank, and warm earth-tone paint in browns, oranges, and greens. The unit also features a full kitchen with ovens, stoves, and air fryers — an amenity whose safety implications Hyatt has directly addressed: "You can give incarcerated people access to a full kitchen with ovens and stoves and air fryers and it's not going to devolve into violence." An incarcerated man in the unit described the result simply: "It's a whole different vibe. It's more of a community."

SCI Chester's broader facility context matters here. The prison has 14 housing units in total; five operate under therapeutic-community models, one operates with all-Spanish-language programming, and Unit CA — now Little Scandinavia — represents the Nordic-inspired pilot. Seventeen staff members have worked at SCI Chester continuously since the facility opened in 1998, a stability factor Pennsylvania DOC has cited as a reason for selecting the facility to host the pilot.

Officers in the Little Scandinavia unit operate under a Contact Officer model — a hybrid of correctional officer and correctional counselor modeled explicitly on the Norwegian system — with explicit responsibilities for mentorship rather than custody alone. The staff-to-incarcerated-people ratio is approximately 1:8, compared to approximately 1:128 in standard SCI Chester housing units. This ratio differential is the unit's most significant ongoing cost factor: the $310,000 setup cost covers renovation only and does not include the personnel cost differential of running a 1:8 unit over time. On a per-bed basis, the renovation cost is approximately $4,844 per bed — a figure that compares favorably, at least as a capital cost, to the approximately $95,600 per bed being spent on the California San Quentin project ($239 million divided by 2,500 beds).

The safety record is notable. Since the unit opened in 2022, staff have responded to a single physical altercation — a rate officials describe as substantially lower than other SCI Chester housing units. Hyatt has reported that residents "report higher levels of satisfaction with the community, especially regarding the relationships between the people who live and work" in the unit. Pennsylvania DOC Secretary Harry has noted that staff working in the unit have reported a greater "sense of purpose." In March 2025, following results from a randomized controlled trial — the first RCT designed to test whether Nordic environmental conditions measurably move recidivism outcomes — Secretary Harry announced that Pennsylvania would expand the Scandinavian-inspired approach to three additional facilities, expected to include a maximum-security site and a women's facility.

California: The San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and the California Model

Governor Gavin Newsom's administration is spending approximately $239 million to remake San Quentin State Prison into a Scandinavian-style rehabilitation center with capacity for upwards of 2,500 incarcerated people, scheduled to open in January 2026 — construction already underway. The redesign, developed with a Danish architecture firm, is positioned as the flagship of a broader system-wide reform effort dubbed "the California Model." California's proposed FY2026–27 corrections budget is approximately $14.2 billion — approximately 7.9 times the size of GDC's $1.8 billion budget against a custody population approximately twice as large — with much of the increase attributed to officer pay growing at approximately three times the rate of inflation. Planned features of the San Quentin center include vocational training hubs, a podcast studio, a farmer's market, and a self-serve grocery store.

The California effort has produced both genuine staff conversion and significant institutional friction. Officer Richard Kruse told the Los Angeles Times that he was "stoked" about the changes, embraced a role on San Quentin's "resource team," and now uses board games and video games as tools for modeling social behavior with incarcerated people: "They're gonna leave someday. That's going to be my community too." The state correctional union has offered "guarded support" for the California Model changes. But according to the Sacramento Bee, staff buy-in remains the "biggest obstacle" to the rollout, with some officers alleging that new freedoms awarded to incarcerated people "created more dangerous situations." The pattern echoes resistance documented elsewhere: officers in Connecticut have reportedly found it hard to shake the belief that prison "should feel like a prison." Amend trainer Kevin Reeder, working with skeptical officers, has reframed the case for staff: "You're doing this for the incarcerated, but you're also doing this for your colleagues" — a reference to the documented high rates of PTSD, depression, suicide, and shortened life expectancy in the corrections profession, which Reeder argues may be worsened by operating in the harsh environments officers are being asked to reform.

The California effort has also generated a significant internal dissent case that illuminates the tension between institutional rehabilitation narratives and incarcerated people's own agency. Steve Brooks became editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News (SQN) — a 1940-founded prison newspaper widely regarded as the country's leading incarcerated-journalist-led publication — in early 2023. That same year, Brooks co-founded "The People in Blue" (TPIB), a group of incarcerated people that contributed substantially to Governor Newsom's "Reimagine San Quentin" advisory process. In late 2023, TPIB convinced advisory council members to reduce construction costs by $120 million and redirect those funds toward improving living conditions for incarcerated people — a concrete policy intervention from inside.

On December 8, 2023, Brooks was sitting at his desk in the SQN newsroom when custody staff required him to gather his belongings and leave. He was charged with "over-familiarity" with a volunteer. At a subsequent disciplinary hearing, Brooks pled not guilty and presented evidence that the person he was accused of being over-familiar with was not a volunteer but a staff member — a distinction that bore directly on the charge. He was nonetheless found guilty. He later appealed and was cleared. Despite his exoneration, Brooks was not reinstated to his editorial role. In April 2025, Brooks published a personal essay describing this sequence of events and arguing that his writing questioning the San Quentin redesign had cost him his position. He published a comprehensive critique in Truthout framing the San Quentin redesign as an "expensive rebranding effort" that takes agency away from incarcerated people, arguing that even at its best, the redesign would not scale to California's massive prison system or address the conditions faced by the overwhelming majority of incarcerated Californians. Brooks has continued publishing in Bay City News Foundation, Prism Reports, TIME, and Truthout — demonstrating that California correctional administrators can prevent an incarcerated journalist from operating within institutional media structures, but cannot prevent publication itself. The case documents a pattern of allegation, discipline, exoneration, and continued exclusion as a methodology for removing institutional access without leaving a sustainable disciplinary record.

The Nordic Evidence Base and Its Limits

The recidivism gap driving Nordic-inspired reform is substantial. Norway's recidivism rate is approximately 20% at two years post-release and approximately 25% at five years. Pennsylvania's is approximately 65% at three years. The U.S. average approaches 80% at five years. The SPP's RCT at SCI Chester is the first study specifically designed to test whether replicating Nordic environmental and relational conditions — rather than simply Nordic program curricula — can move those numbers in an American context. That question has not previously been answered with methodological rigor; criminologist Keramet Reiter of UC Irvine, studying parallel implementations in Washington state (across three prisons, via the Amend program at UCSF, without randomization), has noted that "it is really hard in the context of prisons to isolate the impacts of interventions" from each other and from other facility factors. Beyond Pennsylvania and California, Washington, Oregon, and North Dakota are also implementing Nordic-inspired prison reforms at varying scales.

What the evidence also shows, however, is that the Nordic model is not immune to the institutional pressures that undermine programming everywhere. Norway's national incarcerated population — historically approximately 5,000 — is currently under 3,000, yet understaffing has led to incarcerated people being locked in their cells for up to 22 hours a day and programming being suspended while staff are reassigned to guard duty. Denmark's prisons are over capacity, attributed in part to longer sentences for violent crimes. Researcher Kaigan Carrie has concluded: "The Nordic countries still provide a source of inspiration regarding their smaller prison populations and more humane approaches to imprisonment. But as political..." — the structural problems now visible in Norway and Denmark, understaffing, lockdowns, overcrowding, and programming suspension, are precisely the conditions GDC currently exhibits without ever having adopted the Nordic framework in the first place. The Georgia Department of Corrections' documented 52.5% correctional officer vacancy rate makes the staff-intensive Contact Officer model, with its 1:8 ratio, structurally unreplicable under current GDC conditions without foundational investment in staffing that Georgia has not made.

The reform effort has also drawn criticism from multiple directions. Some prison abolitionists have framed Nordic-style prison reform as a "distraction" from more fundamental decarceration work. Some victims' rights groups have opposed the San Quentin spending, arguing that funds should be directed to victims' services. Some conservative critics have characterized the effort as "putting criminals ahead of law-abiding citizens." These critiques occupy different political registers but converge on a shared skepticism about whether architectural and relational reform — absent structural changes to sentencing, supervision, and resource allocation — constitutes durable change or expensive rebranding.