More than a dozen New Yorkers crowded into an empty cell at Tegel Prison in Berlin this October and found a detail that would be unthinkable in most American prisons: the men held there have keys to their own cells, NPR reported. Prison director Martin Riemer told the group the point is that inmates can lock their door when they go to work or school, the way someone might at home. Guards still have keys. Riemer said the gesture offers a semblance of privacy. Every prison cell in Germany must also have natural light and ventilation.
The visitors kept noticing smaller contrasts. U.S. jails often smell of poor ventilation and noise; this prison, they said, did not. Aisha Elliott, who spent more than 20 years incarcerated in New York and is now chief program officer at the Women's Prison Association, noticed the furniture. "There's a lot of wood and movable objects, which I think makes it more bearable. Everything in New York is steel, metal, thin and painful," she said. Tina Luongo, who leads the Legal Aid Society's criminal defense practice, kept looking at the toilets. In American jails they remind her of a metal dog bowl; in Berlin, most were porcelain, like at home. "It's speaking to me because it's the smallest thing," she said. "I have to believe that makes a difference in how you show up in those places."
European prisons are not a romance. Officials in Germany told the group that officers still deal with violence and overdoses, and prisoners said they still want more human contact and better food. Norway and Denmark have overcrowding, understaffing, and lockdowns. After the Holocaust, Germany adopted a constitution that centers on protecting human dignity, including in prison. The loss of freedom is treated as the punishment, not the conditions inside. By law, life inside a German prison is supposed to resemble life outside as much as possible, a concept known as normalization. Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice said that can mean cooking, wearing street clothes, or putting a door or curtain on a cell toilet. German staff go through years of training, often with backgrounds in social work or law; U.S. correctional officers often train for weeks or months. Nancy La Vigne, dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, called watching the model in person "very inspiring." The tour is a comparison, not a claim that the United States is about to hand every inmate a key.