Orangutans have culture and we can no longer swing
in trees but the Finns don't lock the doors on their prisons. What
do you think of that? Its not Texas!
January 2, 2003
Finnish Prisons: No Gates or Armed Guards
By WARREN HOGE
Finnish Prisons: No Gates or Armed Guards
By WARREN HOGE
KERAVA, Finland — Going by the numbers, Antti Syvajarvi is a loser. He is a prison inmate in Finland — the country that jails fewer of its citizens than any other in the European Union.
Still, he counts himself fortunate.
"If I have to be a prisoner," he said, "I'm happy
I'm one in Finland because I trust the Finnish system."
So, evidently, do law-abiding Finns, even though
their system is Europe's most lenient and would probably be the object of
soft-on-criminals derision in many societies outside of the Nordic
countries.
In polls measuring what national institutions they
admire the most, Finns put their criminal-coddling police in the No. 1
position.
The force is the smallest in per capita terms in
Europe, but it has a corruption-free reputation and it solves 90 percent of its
serious crimes.
"I know this system sounds like a curiosity," said
Markku Salminen, a former beat patrolman and homicide detective who is now the
director general of the prison service in charge of punishments. "But if you
visit our prisons and walk our streets, you will see that this very mild version
of law enforcement works. I don't blame other countries for having harsher
systems because they have different histories and politics, but this model works
for us."
Finland, a relatively classless culture
with a Scandinavian belief in the benevolence of the state and a trust in its
civic institutions, is something of a laboratory for gentle justice. The kinds
of economic and social disparities that can produce violence don't exist in
Finland's welfare state society, street crime is low, and law enforcement
officials can count on support from an uncynical public.
Look in on Finland's penal institutions, whether
those the system categorizes as "open" or "closed," and it is hard to tell when
you've entered the world of custody. "This is a closed prison," Esko Aaltonen,
warden of the Hameenlinna penitentiary, said in welcoming a visitor. "But you
may have noticed you just drove in, and there was no gate blocking
you."
Walls and fences have been removed in favor of
unobtrusive camera surveillance and electronic alert networks. Instead of
clanging iron gates, metal passageways and grim cells, there are
linoleum-floored hallways lined with living spaces for inmates that resemble
dormitory rooms more than lockups in a slammer.
Guards are unarmed and wear either civilian clothes
or uniforms free of emblems like chevrons and epaulettes. "There are 10 guns in
this prison, and they are all in my safe," Mr. Aaltonen said.
"The only time I take them out is for transfer of
prisoners."
At the "open" prisons, inmates and guards address
each other by first name. Prison superintendents go by nonmilitary titles like
manager or governor, and prisoners are sometimes referred to as "clients" or, if
they are youths, "pupils."
"We are parents, that's what we are," said Kirsti
Njeminen, governor of the Kerava prison that specializes in rehabilitating young
offenders like Mr. Syvajarvi.
Generous home leaves are available, particularly as
the end of a sentence nears, and for midterm inmates, there are houses on the
grounds, with privacy assured, where they can spend up to four days at a time
with visiting spouses and children.
"We believe that the loss of freedom is the major
punishment, so we try to make it as nice inside as possible," said Merja
Toivonen, a supervisor at Hameenlinna.
Natalia Leppamaki, 39, a Russian immigrant
convicted of drunken driving, switched off a sewing machine she was using to
make prison clothing and picked up on Ms. Toivonen's point. "Here you have work,
you can eat and you can do sports, but home is home, and I don't think you'll
see me in here again," she said.
Thirty years ago, Finland had a rigid model,
inherited from neighboring Russia, and one of the highest rates of imprisonment
in Europe. But then academics provoked a thoroughgoing rethinking of penal
policy, with their argument that it ought to reflect the region's liberal
theories of social organization.
"Finnish criminal policy is exceptionally
expert-oriented," said Tapio Lappi-Seppala, director of the National Research
Institute of Legal Policy. "We believe in the moral-creating and value-shaping
effect of punishment instead of punishment as retribution."
He asserted that over the last two decades, more
than 40,000 Finns had been spared prison, $20 million in costs had been saved,
and the crime rate had gone down to relatively low Scandinavian levels.
Mr. Salminen, the prison service director, pulled
out a piece of paper and drew three horizontal lines. "This first level is
self-control, the second is social control and the third is officer control. In
Finland," he explained, "we try to intervene at this first level so people won't
get to the other two."
The men and women who work in the prisons also back
the softer approach. "There are officers who were here 20 and 30 years ago, and
they say it was much tougher to work then, with more people trying to escape and
more prison violence," said Kaisa Tammi-Moilanen, 32, governor of the open ward
at Hameenlinna.
She conceded that there were people who took
advantage of the leniency. Risto Nikunen, 41, a grizzled drifter who has never
held a job and has been in prison 11 times, was asked outside his drug
rehabilitation unit if he might be one of them. "Well," he shrugged, "many
people do come to prison to take a break and try to get better
again."
Prison officials can give up to 20 days solitary
confinement to inmates as punishment for infractions like fighting or possessing
drugs, though the usual term is from three to five days. Mr. Aaltonen said he
tried to avoid even that by first talking out the problem with the offending
inmate.
Finnish courts mete out four general punishments —
a fine, a conditional sentence, which amounts to probation, community service
and an unconditional sentence. Even this last category is made less harsh by a
practice of letting prisoners out after only half their term is served. Like the
rest of the countries of the European Union, Finland has no death penalty.
According to the Ministry of Justice in Helsinki,
there are a little more than 2,700 prisoners in Finland, a country of 5.2
million people, or 52 for every 100,000 inhabitants. Ministry figures show the
comparable rate is 702 per 100,000 in the United States, 664 in Russia and 131
in Portugal, the highest in the European Union.
Finland's chief worry now is the rise in
drug-related crimes that do result in prison sentences and the growing number of
Russians and Estonians, who Mr. Lappi-Seppala said were introducing
organized-crime activities into Finland.
Finns credit their press and their politicians with
keeping the law-and- order debate civil and not strident. "Our newspapers are
not full of sex and crime," Mr. Salminen said. "And there is no pressure on me
to get tough on criminals from populist-issue politicians like there would be in
a lot of other countries."
One reason why the Finnish public may tolerate
their policy of limited punishment is that victims receive compensation payments
from the government. Mrs. Tammi-Moilanen was asked if this was enough to keep
them from getting angry over the system of gentle justice.
"My feeling is that victims wouldn't feel that
justice is better done by giving very severe punishment," she said. "We don't
believe in an eye for an eye, we are a bit more civilized than that, I
hope."
Mr. Syvajarvi, a muscular 21-year-old with
close-cropped hair who become a heroin addict at age 14, received a six-year
sentence for drug selling and assaults. As a young offender, he will serve only
a third of that time, and he is expected to be out in a year.
He is now the appointed "big brother" peer
counselor to other youths in the jail, must submit to random drug checks to make
sure he remains off the habit and has undergone training with anger management
specialists that he says has prepared him to rejoin society with a new
outlook.
"Before, I wanted to be like those drug dealers in
the States," he said, adding in English, "I was a gangster wannabe." He went
into a boxer's crouch and popped punches in the air. "I used to think the most
important thing was to stand up for yourself.
"Now I've learned that it takes more courage to run
away."
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 4:42
PM
Subject: [Futurework] NYTimes.com Article:
Orangutans Said to Exhibit Hallmarks of Culture
> has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED].
>
>
>
> Orangutans Said to Exhibit Hallmarks of Culture
>
> January 2, 2003
> By CAROL KAESUK YOON
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Orangutans, those red-haired, knuckle-dragging apes, are
> loping today into the upper echelons of the hominid
> hierarchy. According to research reported in the journal
> Science, they exhibit what was until very recently
> considered a uniquely human attribute: culture.
>
> Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of thousands of
> hours of observations from six different sites in the wild,
> an international team of scientists found evidence that
> orangutan groups differ in everything from bedtime rituals
> to eating habits to sexual practices - patterns of
> behavior, passed from generation to generation, that
> scientists call culture.
>
> Other researchers reported four years ago that chimpanzees
> differ in the way they groom one another, hunt and eat ants
> and so on. Scientists say the new work suggests that the
> two remaining great ape species, gorillas and bonobos, are
> likely to have culture as well and that great ape culture
> dates back at least to the origin of the entire group 14
> million years ago.
>
> The finding has been of particular interest as orangutans
> have long been thought to be loners, leaving little
> possibility for the creation of culture. Yet researchers
> found that at one site all orangutans gave a Bronx cheer
> before going to sleep, while at other sites this curious
> ritual was absent. In some forests, orangutans had a
> characteristic way of hunting and killing a beast known as
> the slow loris or extracting seeds from the stinging fruit
> of the Neesia tree. Yet in other forests where the loris
> and Neesia were found, orangutans never took these meals.
> And while in two forests, orangutans enjoyed masturbation
> using sticks, elsewhere such behavior was unheard of.
>
> As is typical whenever scientists aim to award prized
> attributes of Homo sapiens to other, wilder creatures,
> there has been heated reaction.
>
> Some point out that while unlikely, it is possible that the
> orangutans behave differently at different sites because of
> undetected differences in their forest habitat. Some
> scientists also object in principle to the use of the
> heavily freighted term culture, which has long been used to
> denote something peculiarly human - like wearing white
> rather than black to funerals, say, or shaking hands rather
> than kissing as a greeting.
>
> Further research on orangutan culture may be difficult,
> however, because the species as a whole is threatened as
> people steadily encroach on its habitats.
>
> But others said that great ape cultures were just the tip
> of the iceberg.
>
> "In the coming 20 years, we will have a host of studies on
> culture in all sorts of animals," said Dr. Frans de Waal,
> primatologist at Emory University, saying data have been
> coming in suggesting cultural differences among rats, birds
> and even fish. "We will not think of culture as a
> monolithic thing, but a concept that includes songbirds,
> the great apes and human culture."
>
> The study grew out of a workshop that gathered orangutan
> researchers who had worked for years in isolation from one
> another at remote field sites on the islands of Borneo and
> Sumatra, the only places orangutans can be found in the
> wild.
>
> "You know your own animals and all of them do particular
> things," said Dr. Carel van Schaik, biological
> anthropologist at Duke University and lead author on the
> paper. "So you think all orangutans do these things. Nobody
> thought there'd be so much variation between the sites."
>
> Dr. van Schaik said there was no evidence of ecological
> differences or genetic differences that would lead to such
> differences in behavior. In addition, at sites where
> orangutans spent more time together there were more of
> these widespread behaviors, as would be expected with
> behaviors that can be spread through association. In
> addition, the closer sites were to one another, the more
> behaviors those sites shared, again as would be expected.
>
> But Dr. Bennett Galef, animal behaviorist at McMaster
> University, cautioned that it can be difficult to decipher
> what is causing differences in behavior among populations
> in the wild.
>
> For example, in a classic example of chimp culture,
> chimpanzees are known to use very different methods for
> extracting ants from ant nests in eastern and western
> Africa. But in a recent study, researchers reported finding
> a new group of chimpanzees that will use either method,
> depending on how aggressive the ant they are hunting is.
> Dr. Galef said the finding suggests that even this classic
> chimp cultural divide might have a hidden ecological
> explanation as simple as the difference in what kinds of
> ants are available to chimps in different areas.
>
> Most work so far has relied on simply observing animals in
> the wild. Dr. Galef said the only way to definitively
> answer many of the key remaining questions will be through
> experiments in the field.
>
> Unfortunately, researchers say some of the newly uncovered
> cultures have likely already been destroyed.
>
> Dr. van Schaik said that one site in Sumatra, home of the
> goodnight Bronx cheer and the hunting of the slow loris,
> has been devastated over the past several years by an
> intense wave of illegal logging despite being within a
> national park. Another of his long-term study sites in
> Borneo has been devastated by civil war and is still too
> dangerous to return to.
>
> But even if he were able to go back, Dr. van Schaik said,
> "probably all the orangutans we knew there are gone."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/science/02CND_APE.html?ex=1042543767&ei=1&en=af3b7751e0b1549b
>
>
>
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