Jennifer Macy
California State University-Dominguez Hills, CA·Social Science
Many prisons are harsh places, and reformers often point to the "Nordic Model" as a more humane option. Nordic prisons are built around human dignity.
- Fields
Social Science
- Topics
Nordic Model
incarceration
prisons
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Trace how Nordic incarceration principles such as dignity, normalization and resocialization have been translated into U.S. correctional policy and practice, using archival documents, interviews and observation at several implementation sites.
- Identify the short- and long-term goals of adopting the Nordic Model and the factors that help or constrain reaching them, by comparing different pathways of innovation across study sites.
- Document how correctional staff and incarcerated people experience Nordic-model reforms, through interviews and on-site observation in U.S. prisons.
More about the research
Their goal is to prepare people to return to society rather than mainly to punish them. Several U.S. corrections systems are now trying the model, even though American prisons rest on very different, more punitive values. This collaborative project asks how those values get translated, negotiated and lived out when a reform like this moves into a new setting.
Why it matters
Policymakers, corrections officials and reform advocates weighing humane prison models could use this evidence on what helps or blocks adoption of Nordic-style practices in U.S. prisons and how staff and incarcerated people experience them. The findings could inform whether such reforms can be sustained.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Julia Melkers
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Education Research
Identify the policy, institutional, structural and cultural factors that enable or block innovation in academic engineering programs during crisis, through comparative case studies in five Research Periphery Countries.
Michael Mueller-Smith
University of Michigan, MI·Social Science·Early-career
Measure how the risk of criminal justice system (CJS) involvement, including conviction numbers and rates, has changed over recent decades and across local geographies, using nationally linked CJARS records.
Chloe Kessler
Cornell University, NY·Social Science
Identify what kinds of environmental futures extremist environmental groups seek and trace the historical precedents for those visions, using text analysis of online archival material and media analysis.
The school
California State University-Dominguez Hills: 1 labs on PI Pages, $6M a year on research.
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