What if prisons had no walls? Finland and Norway already run them

An island with no fence

Suomenlinna is a sea fortress on a group of islands off Helsinki, built from 1748 and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991. In 1918, after Finland's civil war, it held a prison camp for captured Red Guard fighters (Wikipedia, 2026a).

Since 1971 it has held a different kind of prison. About 100 men live at the southern tip of one island and spend their weekdays repairing the fortress: its buildings, its stone walls and its landscape. The fortress's governing body assigns the work sites (Prison and Probation Service of Finland, n.d.-a; Wikipedia, 2026b). The men who once would have been locked behind walls now keep a world heritage site standing for the tourists and picnickers who visit it.

What "open" means

Finnish law has two kinds of prison, closed and open. In an open prison, people "may spend time and move within the area of the prison or its ward, in the workplace, or in another place of activity without immediate supervision". They wear their own clothes (Imprisonment Act 767/2005, ch. 4 s. 1; ch. 9 s. 2). Maintenance work pays €4.70 to €5.00 an hour into the person's own bank account, and some people get permission to work for an ordinary employer outside (Prison and Probation Service of Finland, n.d.-b). The criminologist Tapio Lappi-Seppälä puts it plainly: open institutions "are in practice prisons without walls" (2009, p. 344).

In 2025, about 67% of Finland's prisoner places were in closed prisons and 33% in open prisons or open wards (Prison and Probation Service of Finland, 2026).

Norway's farm island

Norway runs the same idea on Bastøy, an island 75 km south of Oslo reached only by ferry. It is the country's largest low-security prison, with places for 125 men (Kriminalomsorgen, n.d.). The men live in wooden cottages and work the prison farm. Of 69 staff, five stay on the island overnight (Wikipedia, 2026c).

The island has held people before. From 1900 it was a reformatory for boys, run under strict discipline. In 1915 the boys rebelled, and the government sent more than 100 troops, two seaplanes and two submarines to end it (Wikipedia, 2026c). The same ground that once took a small army to control now runs on trust and a ferry timetable.

Norway calls this the principle of normality: life inside should resemble life outside as closely as safety allows. People in prison keep their right to vote, and they get health care, schooling and library services from the same public agencies as everyone else (Wikipedia, 2026d).

How Finland emptied its prisons

Finland did not always look like this. After civil war, prohibition, depression and two wars with Russia, it locked up three to four times as many people as its Nordic neighbours, who kept their rates between 40 and 80 per 100,000 (Lappi-Seppälä, 2009).

Year	Finland, prisoners per 100,000
1950	187
1970	111
1990	69
2000	55
2025	58

(World Prison Brief, 2025a)

For comparison, Australia's rate in June 2025 was 170 (World Prison Brief, 2025b).

The fall came from law, passed step by step from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s: shorter minimum terms before parole, lighter penalties for theft and property crime, fines and suspended sentences instead of prison for drink driving, less weight on past convictions, and limits on imprisoning young people (Lappi-Seppälä, 2009, p. 352).

Crime did not explode. Lappi-Seppälä compared Finland with Sweden, Denmark and Norway from 1950 to 2000 and found "a striking difference in the use of imprisonment, and a striking similarity in the trends in recorded criminality" (2009, p. 362). Finland let far more people go home, and its crime tracked its neighbours' anyway.

The professor who became Minister of Justice

Part of the story is a person. Inkeri Anttila became Finland's first woman to earn a doctorate in law, in 1946, and its first woman professor of criminal law, in 1961. In the 1950s she ran a training centre for prison staff. From 1963 she was the first director of the Institute of Criminology in the Ministry of Justice. In 1975 she served six months as Minister of Justice and pushed reforms to suspended sentences, drink driving and parole. She worked just as hard for victims: better protection and better services for the people harmed (Wikipedia, 2026e).

Anttila was one of a small group of experts who shared, in the words of criminologist Patrik Törnudd, "an almost unanimous conviction that Finland's comparatively high prisoner rate was a disgrace" and could be cut "without serious repercussions on the crime situation" (quoted in Lappi-Seppälä, 2009, p. 362).

Why it happened there

Criminologists call this Nordic "penal exceptionalism": low imprisonment and humane prisons. John Pratt traces it to "cultures of equality" built into daily life through a welfare state that serves everyone (Pratt, 2008). Lappi-Seppälä adds details that show what Finns value:

• A slogan, not a threat. "Good social policy is the best criminal policy." Money spent on schools, social work and families does more than money spent on prisons.
• Counting every harm. From the 1970s, the stated goal became reducing the total harm of crime and of punishing it, including the harm to the person punished, and sharing those costs fairly between the offender, society and the victim.
• Newspapers that don't need a scare. About 90% of Finns read a paper every day, and almost 90% of papers are sold by subscription, so they don't need a dramatic front page to sell each morning. Crime has never been a central election issue.
• A country catching up. Between 1966 and 1990 income inequality in Finland fell sharply as it joined its neighbours' welfare model.

(Lappi-Seppälä, 2009, pp. 350, 363–365)

Who gets in, and what it doesn't prove

Open prisons are not for everyone, and saying so keeps the idea honest.

• Finland screens. A person can start in an open prison only on a sentence of two years or less. Anyone can transfer later, but only if the move fits their sentence plan and staff judge they will follow the rules, not offend and not leave. Everyone must agree to stay off alcohol and drugs and accept testing (Imprisonment Act 767/2005, ch. 4 s. 9; ch. 6 s. 1).
• Bastøy takes men near the end of longer sentences who have usually already done home leave (Kriminalomsorgen, n.d.). Bastøy reports that 16% of its men reoffend (Wikipedia, 2026c), but people chosen as low risk will reoffend less wherever they live, so that number can't be set against a closed prison's.
• Walls come down; pain doesn't vanish. A survey of 1,082 prisoners in Norway and England found open prisons rated much better than closed ones, but the same pains of imprisonment remained, felt as less severe and more manageable (Mjåland et al., 2021).
• Escapes happen. In 2015 a man left Bastøy on a stolen surfboard (Wikipedia, 2026c).

What the evidence does show is that prison built around rehabilitation can reduce crime. Using cases randomly assigned to stricter and more lenient judges in Norway, economists found that going to prison cut the chance of reoffending over five years by 29 percentage points. The drop came from people who had not been working before: inside, they joined employment programmes, and afterwards they worked and earned more (Bhuller et al., 2020). Prison that looks like life outside prepares people for life outside.

For what closed, harsh prison does to people after release, see It wasn't that bad? What prison does to people after release.

What you can check

• Look up your state's prisoner numbers by security level. Ask how many people are held in maximum or medium security who would qualify for an open setting under Finland's rules.
• When someone proposes a tougher sentence, ask the Finnish question: what will it cost the victim, the community and the person sentenced, and who pays?
• Remember the table. Finland cut its prison rate by more than two thirds and kept pace with its neighbours on crime. It chose to. Any country can.