TYJI’s Danielle Cooper, Ph.D., CPP and Brittany LaMarr joined Andrew Clark and a dozen others in a visit to Norway this winter. Andrew Clark is the director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut. On their trip, they visited a halfway house and got an inside look at the policies and systems of a country that has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“We go on trips like this in order to better rebut when people say that nothing is happening to better handle justice,” Dr. Cooper said. “People might say you have to treat people a certain way if they’ve committed certain types of offenses, and Norway is saying, ‘that’s not how we feel about it. That’s not how we feel about our people.”
The experience in Norway allowed Cooper, LaMarr, and Clark to understand the theoretical models used in their system such as the import model, where professionals in the juvenile system come from within the community.
Norway’s policies will inform representatives of the youth justice field in the United States as they bring these models back to their own work in policy, education, and program building.
“Collectively, the Norwegian society and systems are invested in making better neighbors out of individuals who are currently incarcerated, by connecting them to the community, school, health, family, and support,” LaMarr explained. “Here in the States, we have a system that’s fundamental purpose is retribution, dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and oppression – a complete disconnection from normalcy and things necessary to help build people up.”