An El Dorado County Superior Court judge Friday formally exonerated a deceased Oregon woman who had falsely confessed to a brutal murder in the Sierra Nevada foothills decades ago, bringing closure to her two adult sons who were children when she was imprisoned for a crime she did not commit.
“Oftentimes the public thinks the job of a prosecutor is to do nothing but come in and try to put people away,” said Lisette Suder, an El Dorado County assistant district attorney. “And that’s really not our job at all. Our job is to seek justice.”
She told the judge: “We are asking the court to legally undo a wrong. It was almost 40 years in the making, this wrong.”
Connie Dahl died of a heart attack in March 2014. She was 48.
(Jarred Lange)
Connie Dahl was 19 in 1985 when she and her then-boyfriend, Ricky Davis, returned from night of partying to find the desecrated body of a house guest in the upstairs bedroom.
Police quickly focused on Davis — and Dahl — as suspects rather than witnesses. But they were not charged and went their separate ways.
In 1999, investigators reopened the cold case and relentlessly interrogated Dahl. Though Dahl at first maintained her innocence, the investigators pressured her to adopt a version of the crime they believed was true, in which Dahl helped Davis carry out the killing.
El Dorado County Assistant Dist. Atty. Lisette Suder listens to Ricky Davis make a statement in court Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Davis was convicted in 2005, largely on Dahl’s false testimony, and sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2020 based on DNA tests that proved he was innocent. The DNA also led police to the real killer, who pleaded no contest to the murder in 2022 and is now in prison. The same evidence proved Dahl was not involved in the crime, but she had died in 2014, and no one thought to clear her name.
Times reporters told El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson of the oversight, and that Dahl’s children had never been told that she was no longer considered guilty. Pierson quickly moved to ask the court to vacate her conviction and declare Dahl factually innocent.
On Friday, Pierson gathered with her two sons, Nick and Jarred Lange, at the El Dorado County Courthouse. Davis joined them.
Standing outside the courtroom before the hearing, Jarred and Nick met Davis for the first time. A colorful character wearing a bright pink tie and a leather biker vest who showed up on a red Harley-Davidson — he was, they agreed, just the kind of guy their mother would fall for.
Ricky Davis, left, speaks with El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson in court Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
“I am sorry for what happened to you,” Jarred told Davis.
“Look, I was never really mad,” Davis told the brothers. “It was a malleable time in your mom’s life.”
Davis, who has spent years looking over the transcripts of Dahl’s interrogations, trying to understand why she would implicate them both in a crime they had nothing to do with, added, “I believe she was indoctrinated.”
“Yeah, and she started to question herself,” Jarred said.
Later, Davis would tell the judge: “I want to see her vindicated. She was as innocent as I was. She was railroaded in a different way.”
These men arrived almost at once at the courthouse Friday morning, passing through the metal detector one by one, even the district attorney was forced to remove his belt by an officer who did not recognize him. They stood awkwardly greeting one another as they put their belts back on, then walked up the wide staircase to wait outside Judge Larry E. Hayes’ courtroom.
Ricky Davis addresses the court on Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Then they filed in: The Lange brothers, who flew in from Oregon, took seats in the first row; Davis sat behind them. Other lawyers and family members of defendants in court for unrelated matters looked on in surprise.
“My condolences to the family and to the people who have been traumatized by this whole situation,” the judge said. “But I hope you walk out of the courtroom with finally justice being done in the correct way.”
The Lange brothers sat impassively. Nick, a father of 1-year-old twin boys, hesitated when the judge asked if they wanted to speak.
Finally, he stood: “I just wish she could be here for this. She has been gone for over 10 years, and in the 20 years I had with her she wasn’t well for most of the time. So I wish she could just be here and she would have gotten the help she deserved.”
Judge Larry E. Hayes presided over the hearing that exonerated Connie Dahl.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Earlier, Jarred and Nick described how their mother’s arrest wrecked their lives.
They were shuffled from relative to relative with little stability or understanding of why their mother was gone. When she was finally freed in 2006 and allowed to return to Oregon on probation, her record made it almost impossible to find a job or housing. For a time, they were homeless, living in a tent.
After the hearing, the Lange brothers said that they felt a sense of closure. It was not until meeting with a Times reporter in April 2023 they they learned the whole story of what had happened to her, Nick said. Ever since, he added, he has been thinking about how much his mother went through, and how the wrongful conviction affected all of them.
“Who knows what life could have been like, but it could have been better in almost any way,” Jarred said.
Pierson, the district attorney, offered an apology.
“We can’t take back or bring back the time she spent in custody here … and the negative consequences that happened in her life as well as your life as a result of it,” Pierson told the Lange brothers in court. “But we can take responsibility for it and seek to do better in the future.”
Ricky Davis approaches the lectern to speak to the court as Connie Dahl’s children, Nick Lange, left, and Jarred Lange, right, sit with Julie Ehrlich, a victim witness advocate, in the El Dorado County Courthouse.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Pierson also offered a pledge to ensure that something like this won’t happen again. This case has convinced him the methods authorities use to interrogate suspects are outdated and can lead to false confessions and wrongful convictions.
Since exonerating Davis, he has been on a quest to change how detectives are trained, so that California and the country moves to what he describes as evidence-based tactics that pursue truth and facts over confessions. In 2021, he supported legislation that would have banned the kind of interrogations Dahl endured. But that bill was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cited the high price of retraining detectives across the state.
Pierson, working with the Innocence Project, was successful with a second piece of legislation that banned lying to suspects under the age of 18. That law went into effect this year.
The district attorney has also refused to prosecute any cases in his jurisdiction where confessions were obtained with the technique, and arranges training in science-based methods for investigators across the state.
“My goal has always been to change the way we train officers to do interviews and interrogation,” he said.
The Lange brothers walked out of the dim courthouse Friday morning and into the bright Northern California sun. They were surprised by how pleasant Placerville seemed, the charm of a Gold Rush town on a summer day.
“She used to tell us all the time that we were going to be the only thing each of us had at some point,” said Nick Lange, at right with his brother. “She was right.”
(Isaac Wasserman / For The Times)
Their mom had once walked this stretch of shops and bars on Main Street in search of fun — a carefree young woman who didn’t understand how precarious her freedom was until it was gone.
They wished they could be here under different circumstances, and that she could have, too. The exoneration was important and even healing, but it was not justice.
“It’s nice to have this come to an end,” Jarred said. “It was a long time coming.”
For three decades, Jamie Nelson has considered Ojai her personal paradise. It’s where she raised her children and cherishes the springtime, when the air smells like jasmine and orange blossoms.
“Lots of times, I’ve said, ‘God, I think Heaven probably smells like this,’” Nelson said of this artsy tourist town of 7,500 people.
Now, Nelson, a 74-year-old grandmother who has heart problems and bad knees and leans heavily on a cane, is homeless. She lives in a tent outside the historic Ojai City Hall, where a growing encampment filled with older people has vexed a community known for spiritual retreats, chakra-aligning crystals and organic farms.
“I was scared to death of coming here,” said Nelson, who moved to City Hall in November. “I was so afraid, because I’m older. And I got here and the people are just — they’re very precious. They are very good and very intelligent, and just had things happen.”
Thirty people live on the wooded eight-acre campus. Half are older than 55, and eight are older than 65. And — despite some locals’ assertions that they are refugees from bigger cities like Ventura and Santa Barbara — most are longtime Ojai residents, said Rick Raine, the city’s new homeless services coordinator.
“They say, ‘You’re bringing in people!’ No, people have always been here,” said Raine, who was Nelson’s neighbor years ago.
Rick Raine, Ojai’s homeless services coordinator, created a community room at the City Hall encampment where residents can find fresh coffee and conversation.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
The affordable housing shortage is nothing new in Ojai, but the issue received increased attention last year after a septuagenarian member of the City Council was priced out of her rented house, declared herself homeless and was investigated by a grand jury for no longer living within her council district.
In this 4.4-square-mile city, homelessness used to be more spread out, with people sleeping in their cars or bundled in blankets in the open-air shopping arcade. Now, the crisis is harder to ignore because it is concentrated at the City Hall encampment, which has become a flashpoint as the city pours money and resources into making the setup more livable.
Local politicians and law enforcement officials say they cannot move the encampment because of decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Ojai has no dedicated homeless shelter, and — in cases from Boise, Idaho, and Grants Pass, Ore. — the court determined it was unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment for cities to criminalize camping in public spaces when there are not enough shelter beds.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last month to review the lower court’s decision in the Oregon case and to decide whether cities can enforce camping bans. A ruling is expected this summer.
Melissa Balding is among the homeless residents at Ojai’s City Hall encampment who are trying to keep the property tidy.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
For now, the lower court rulings “really bind us with what we can do,” Ojai Police Chief Trina Newman said. Officers, she said, have responded to reports of theft, loud music, drinking and homeless people trespassing on neighbors’ property.
“We have individuals that have their share of difficulties: Addiction. Mental health problems. When you get a certain amount of people in a small area, there’s going to be problems,” she said.
“But our hands are tied.”
William Holden has encouraged homeless people in Ojai to shelter at the City Hall encampment. “It’s not a new problem,” he says of homelessness. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Ojai’s City Hall is an architectural gem and point of local pride. Originally a family home, later gifted to the city, it was built in 1907 as a Craftsman-style house and later remodeled to fit in with the Mission Revival architecture that Ojai became known for.
Today, scores of tents spread out just beyond the building’s stately arches and wide patios. Many of the campers try to keep the property tidy, picking up trash and cutting the grass with a manual push mower. Some keep tchotchkes — small statues, faux flowers — outside their tents to make the place feel more homey.
Over the last year, the number of people living at the encampment exploded, from about five people to 30.
At a City Council meeting in September, William Holden, a resident of Ojai for 23 years, pushed his elderly chihuahua, Fievel Mouskawitz, in a pink stroller up to the microphone.
“I did this,” Holden, 61, said of the encampment, where he now lives.
“I invited these people who were sleeping in their cars, these people that were under the bridge, to come back here, because I’ve heard the police are not making us move like they do when you’re in an unregistered motor vehicle or sleeping where you’re not supposed to be sleeping.”
“It’s not a new problem,” he added. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
City officials confirmed that word of mouth helped grow the camp, which sits on environmentally sensitive oak woodland grounds that slope down to a creek. The ground is soft, muddy and, in some portions, at risk of a landslide if it gets too saturated, Raine said.
This fall, the City Council allocated $200,000 to deal with the crisis, and Raine was hired to be the city’s first homeless services coordinator. He opened a break room at the encampment where he brews a fresh pot of Folgers coffee every morning. He keeps blankets, coats, boots and extra food on hand — for the people and their pets.
The city added portable toilets, and, in late January, Raine and a slew of volunteers built eight sturdy wilderness tents in the parking lot, off the muddy ground. Raine said he chose eight of the older, more vulnerable campers — including Nelson — for the 8-by-10-foot tents, each of which sits on a fire-treated platform and includes a storage shed.
Four more tents will go up in the coming weeks.
Homeless services coordinator Rick Raine is working with volunteers to erect wilderness tents to shelter the most vulnerable campers in Ojai’s sanctioned homeless camp.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Overall, the town has been supportive of the city’s efforts, said Mayor Betsy Stix. “We’re a loving, caring community, and I think that — it’s so personal,” she said, adding that some municipal employees have a high school classmate living at the camp.
Last month, the city applied for $12.4 million in state grant funding to build tiny homes and provide case management and security. City leaders have promised to relocate the encampment once the money and expansion plans are in place.
But furious neighbors don’t believe them.
“We understand that city staff has stated that the neighbors are fully on board with this plan. That could not be further from the truth,” read a letter sent last month to the City Council and city manager that was signed by 47 people who live near City Hall.
One neighbor, a 73-year-old woman who has owned her house for 39 years, told The Times that the city made no effort to talk to nearby residents.
The woman, who did not give her name because she feared being harassed by people in the encampment, said she worried about fires, with people cooking under the trees and some using propane heaters in their tents. She said she also worried about vulnerable senior citizens living among other campers “who are real bullies.”
Jerry O’Dell returns to his tent, right, at a homeless encampment at Ojai’s City Hall.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Another neighbor — a 43-year-old single mother of three who also declined to give her name — said a man from the camp lunged at her 12-year-old daughter as she rode a skateboard and that her children “do not feel safe.”
“We feel like our neighborhood has been taken over,” she said. “It’s completely changed the vibe here. There’s a port-a-potty right on the corner that doesn’t give the homeless people any privacy. It doesn’t feel like a compassionate solution for them or for us.”
During Ventura County’s point-in-time census in January 2023, Ojai recorded 44 unhoused people. That’s a 42% increase from five years prior — but a steep decline from the 82 people counted in 2007, when the annual survey began. In all of Ventura County last year, there were 2,441 homeless people, the highest number since the count began.
The sharp rise, as in so many places in California, has coincided with skyrocketing housing costs.
The average home price in Ventura County was $834,180 in December 2023, up 38% from December 2018, according to Zillow. The median rent was $2,373 in December 2023, up nearly 23% from 2018, according to data from the real estate firm Apartment List.
In Ojai, the housing shortage has been compounded by strict slow-growth laws, which — along with a ban on chain stores — were intended to maintain the small-town charm. Before an apartment complex opened in 2019, the city had gone for more than a decade without building any multifamily housing.
In December, the City Council approved a 50-unit development that will be Ojai’s first entirely affordable housing project in 30 years. This month, the council tightened a ban on short-term vacation rentals, arguing they are driving up housing costs.
“We natives have worked and volunteered hundreds of hours to keep our town small,” said Councilwoman Suza Francina, a yoga teacher who has lived in Ojai for 67 years. “The irony is that now we’re so desirable and internationally known that people want to invest. The new wave of people, they come here and can afford second and even third homes.”
Longtime residents, she said, are being priced out — including herself.
Ojai City Councilwoman Suza Francina, second from right, nearly lost her seat last year after she was priced out of her rental housing and temporarily moved into a garage room at a friend’s home outside her district.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
In late 2021, Francina, 74, lost the two-bedroom house she had leased for eight years when an investor purchased it, she said. Francina had been paying $1,650 a monthin rent. She later saw it listed for $4,000 a month.
Francina, a former mayor, had spent more than a decade on the City Council. To keep her seat, she had to stay within her district, a roughly two-square-mile portion of south Ojai.
Francina could not find an affordable rental that would accept her two small dogs, Benny and Honey. While she searched, she moved, rent-free, into a small room with no kitchen above a friend’s garage that was in Ojai but not in her district. Francina put most of her belongings in storage and said she was homeless, arguing that people who are couch-surfing fit the description.
She was investigated by the Ventura County Grand Jury, which, in a report last May, said her seat was legally vacant since she did not find housing in her district within 30 days. But she was not removed from office.
Late last summer, Francina rented a bedroom in a house in her district for $950 a month plus utilities, along with a $300-per-month storage unit. The situation, she said, “broadened my whole perspective on how hard it is if you don’t have a home base, and how quickly it affects your mental health, how you can go downhill very quickly.”
Kristen Wingate, who grew up in Ojai, became homeless while recovering from a neck surgery.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Kristen Wingate, who was born in Ojai and has spent most of her life here, also lost her rental house. But unlike Francina, she wound up in the City Hall encampment.
Wingate, 52, has degenerative disc disease. Two years ago, after a neck fusion surgery, she went on state disability. But the money ran out after a year, she said, and she was not medically cleared to go back to her job at a local hardware store. She said her application to receive Social Security disability benefits was denied, a decision she is appealing.
While she was recovering, she said, the owner of her rental house, which was split into three units, sold it. Tenants had to leave.
Wingate lived in her Toyota Camry for a while and, in August, moved into a tent at City Hall with Roscoe, her 50-pound pug and Boston terrier mix. The size of the camp broke her heart, she said, and “everything is just too expensive here” in this town she grew up in. A friend she has known since she was 6 also lives at the encampment.
Kristen Wingate tends to her dog, Roscoe, outside her tent in Ojai.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Wingate’s brown tent sits near a wooden gazebo with chipped white paint. Her sister got married there decades ago. Now, there are tents on either side.
Nelson lives nearby in one of the new white tents, beneath an enormous eucalyptus tree, with her 3-year-old chihuahua mix, Mae Mae.
Bespectacled, with shoulder-length gray hair and a quick laugh, Nelson said she lost her husband to pancreatic cancer six years ago. She ran out of money, moved out of her house, then out of a hotel. She moved to City Hall just before Thanksgiving.
She is stoic, a trait from her south Texas upbringing. Asked if the last few years had been tough, she downplayed her situation: “A little tough, yeah. But the people here always made it better. And being in Ojai just made it all better.”
She hopes the city is able to build tiny homes for people in the encampment. For now, she waits.
On a recent Tuesday night, at a City Council meeting inside City Hall, a discussion about giving grant money to local artists dragged on for more than an hour. Then protesters — including one soaked in faux blood who collapsed and performed the motions of dying — called for a cease-fire in Gaza, half a world away.
Just outside, temperatures dipped into the 40s. In her tent, Nelson piled on blankets, held her dog close and went to sleep.
Times staff writer Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.
It should be no surprise. Shane MacGowan, erstwhile songwriter and singer for the Pogues, had over the years downed oceans of whiskey and porter and ingested enough recreational drugs to get the whole bloody EU bolloxed.
Although news of his death was long expected, it was still a shock to learn that MacGowan died today. And even more so because it came not four months on the heels of the majestic Sinead O’Connor‘s death. The cause of Shane’s death wasn’t specified, but decades of abuse surely played a part. One is reminded of the famous description of Bob Dylan in the 1960s: “He wasn’t burning the candle at both ends. He was using a blowtorch on the middle.”
Dylan’s famous motorcycle accident in 1966 afforded him the chance to step away from his incendiary habits. MacGowan never found – or didn’t take advantage of – such an opportunity. The tales of wretched excess are legendary and play all-too-neatly into the “drunken Irish poet” cliché epitomized by Brendan Behan and, latterly, by Mister MacGowan. Genius is often used as an excuse for addiction and the damage to oneself and to others that follows in its wake. MacGowan’s descent was a long, slow, and painful one to observe.
Born in Kent, England on Christmas Day, 1957, MacGowan’s parents were Irish. He spent a portion of his boyhood in Tipperary. Back in England as a young man, he was one of many inspired by the punk movement to start a band. One thing led to another and the eventual result was the Pogues. (As their fans know, Pogue Mahone, the band’s original name, is Irish for “kiss my arse.”)
Much ink will be spilled recounting epic tales of the Pogues and MacGowan’s atrocious habits and even worse behavior. Such as quotes from Neil McCormick of The Telegraph, who describes Shane’s songs as “succinct narratives of the Irish diaspora in Britain and America that drew on the poetry and culture of his homeland. His songs were peppered with finely observed details, and had, at their heart, a bittersweet romantic longing for a shattered community clinging to its historical identity, and a beautiful empathy for outsiders and the downtrodden.” And the best description of that snicker, “he laughed frequently, emitting a sound halfway between white noise and an industrial accident.”
I could go onnn, but let’s focus instead on the reasons we loved – and worried about – Our Shane in the first place.
MacGowan and company officiated at the shotgun wedding of Irish Trad and Punk Rock. He brought a cold eye and a gift for the vivid detail to his lyrics, evoking the listeners’ sympathy for the rebels, runaways, and misfits who live on the rough margins of cities. “The Old Main Drag” is about a rent boy’s decline and fall:
In the cold winter nights the old town it was chill But there were boys in the cafes who’d give you cheap pills If you didn’t have the money you’d cajole or you’d beg There was always lots of Tuinol on the old main drag
One evening as I was lying down by Leicester Square I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls Between the metal doors at Vine Street, I was beaten and mauled And they ruined my good looks for the old main drag…
“A Rainy Night in Soho” offers a far more tender remembrance:
I’m not singing for the future I’m not dreaming of the past I’m not talking of the first times I never think about the last
Now the song is nearly over We may never find out what it means Still, there’s a light I hold before me You’re the measure of my dreams The measure of my dreams
Years of hard living exacted a toll on MacGowan. His notoriously rotten teeth were (finally!) replaced in 2015. A fall that same year resulted in a hip injury that put him into a wheelchair. In December 2022 he was hospitalized with viral encephalitis. He’d been released from another hospital stay shortly before his death. He’s survived by his wife, the journalist Victoria Clarke, his sister, Siobhan, and his father, Maurice MacGowan.
We at Popdust adore Shane. He was one raucous lad. And this one’s for…the Mighty Kevin.
Inside Halden Fengsel, a high-security prison in Norway, inmates choose their own clothing. Knockoff track suits from designer brands such as Karl Lagerfeld are favored.
They buy fresh produce from their well-stocked grocery store and chop onions with knives from their shared kitchens.
They play in bands and walk in the woods and pray in a graceful holy room where clerestory windows beam sunlight down onto slate floors and a compass shows the direction of Mecca.
But what surprised California corrections officer Steve “Bull” Durham most on a recent visit to Halden wasn’t the prisoners but the guards — how relaxed and happy his Norwegian counterparts were, and how casually they interacted with the inmates.
Members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. visited prisons in Norway in September to better understand the Scandinavian model of incarceration.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
“I am blown away by it,” he said.
Durham has been a California corrections officer for 25 years, much of it in the remote reaches of Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield. He looks like the kind of guy you’d nickname Bull. Big and bald, he leans forward when he walks, like he’s battling the wind, or the world.
I met him on the sidewalk in front of the elegant Grand Hotel in Oslo, just down the street from the stately Royal Palace of King Harald V.
Durham was one of about a dozen members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., or CCPOA, the union that represents the women and men who work in our prisons, who let me tag along with them to Norway recently.
They were there to see firsthand what all the hype is when it comes to the so-called Scandinavian model of incarceration, which California hopes to import in coming months.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is in the process of converting San Quentin into an institution — via the “Scandinavian method”— that is focused on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Tiny, rich, predominantly white and with a population roughly half that of Los Angeles County, Norway doesn’t seem like a good model for anything in California. But Newsom isn’t trying to replicate what Norway does, just adapt the basic premise to create a shift in how and why we incarcerate.
The Scandinavian method acknowledges that people rarely go to prison for life. Instead, it focuses on the reality that most people who go into prison are going to come outagain, and it’s safer for all of us if they have a plan and the skills for a future that doesn’t include more crime. That credo demands that prison is made to be more humane, and more normalized, turning the guards into at least part-time social workers.
“It’s radical,” Durham said, but he’s all for it.
An inmate at Halden prison in Norway visits the facility’s library, where books and DVDs are available to borrow.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
The CCPOA has long supported Newsom. But it is also one of the toughest and most powerful unions in the state and is not known for soft-on-crime stances. So it may surprise some that the union supports the Scandinavian model, even as fentanyl, homelessness and a misguided fear of rising crime have combined to swing the political pendulum back toward more incarceration.
Durham, a CCPOA vice president, said corrections officers in California are literally sick and tired from being cogs in a machine that doesn’t work — for society, for those incarcerated or for guards who want a career that doesn’t kill them.
“We are tired of seeing our partners in a casket,” Durham said. “The stuff that we see is not good.”
Being a U.S. corrections officer is not a great gig, union benefits aside. It comes with levels of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder that far outpace other professions, even in law enforcement.
Corrections officers are quick to tell any listener that the psychological stress and constant threat of violence eat at their health, leaving them vulnerable to ailments including heart attacks, ulcers and fallen arches. They drink too much, get divorced often and die by suicide at a rate 39% higher than the rest of the working-age population, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. Their life expectancy is more than 15 years below the national average.
Many people assume they are all abusive brutes, in dead-end jobs.
“It comes down to the mental health and well-being of our staff,” Durham said. “We have to try to change.”
Helge Valseth, center, the governor of Halden prison (comparable to a U.S. warden) leads a group of U.S. visitors through the facility, which houses about 250 inmates convicted of serious offenses including drug crimes and murder.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
Durham shared those depressing statistics as we rode in a bus to Halden, about two hours outside of Oslo, on an overcast day in September. The drive there took us through picturesque fields where cattle milled around sturdy barns, then up into hills covered in spruce and pine. It felt like traversing the back roads of Napa to Tahoe — all classy ruralism.
Nothing about our arrival at Halden dispelled that, no armed guard towers or razor wire. The only clue this was a prison was the nearly milelong wall that surrounds it, 20 feet high and curving at the top with an elegance that Scandinavians seem able to put into everything they build, regardless of purpose. It was, as a certain former president might describe it, a big, beautiful wall.
“Jeez, look at that wall,” one of the officers exclaimed as we stepped off the bus.
Critics deride Halden as a luxury prison that coddles, but it is the star of the Norwegian system, opened in 2010 with a design and a mantra: Prison should not be defined by the agony of discomfort and fear. The punishment for those incarcerated at Halden is being removed from family and friends — being behind the wall. Not the experience inside it.
Before Norway embraced this new model of incarceration in the 1990s, its prisons looked much like ours do today and recidivism rates were stubbornly high, hovering near 70% for some crimes. Now, though not as low as many had hoped, those rates have fallen to about 20% of people re-offending within five years of release — one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world.
Helge Valseth, left, the governor of Halden prison, shows off the prison grocery store to visiting California correctional officers. The inmates at Halden largely live in dorm-like apartments with a shared kitchen where they cook meals.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
The prison population in Norway is vastly smaller than ours — Halden holds about 250 men, fewer than your average county jail — but there are similarities with the U.S., starting with racial diversity. Forty percent of prisoners in Norway are not citizens by birth — they come from more than 25 countries, many of them migrants from places including Sudan and Pakistan.
Gangs, said Helge Valseth, the governor of Halden (our version of a warden), are a big problem, inside of prisons and out.
What is different at Halden isn’t the prisoners but the guards, Valseth said.
People incarcerated in Norway wear their own clothes and have more freedoms than in U.S. prisons.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
In Norway, corrections is a profession that has pathways into other branches of law enforcement. Officers start off in a two-year college program, paid as they go, and must continue their education, Valseth said. The Norwegian guards union has a partnership with management that allows officers to have a say in how a facility is run, who is hired and what the policies are.
In all, said Tor Erik Larsen, a leader of the Union of Norwegian Correctional Services Employees, it’s a good job — one that comes with respect and provides work that feels meaningful. Under the Scandinavian system, expectations of and from corrections officers extend far beyond maintaining control.
“I need to know what makes a man tick,” Larsen said. “And he needs to know what makes me tick.”
That philosophy is called dynamic security. In the United States, we use static security: lockdowns, body armor, mace. Rehabilitation is largely left up to inmates to figure out on their own through a hodgepodge of programs — some good, some questionable.
The Norwegians depend on relationships to maintain control and highly trained corrections officers to be deeply involved in rehabilitation.
An inmate at Halden prison uses a knife while working in a shop. In Norway, incarcerated people are governed by “dynamic security,” which relies on relationships with guards to maintain order and safety.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
Therapy, job skills, addiction treatment — corrections officers in Norway are responsible for facilitating all of it, and for building the trust and mutual respect needed for inmates to feel like someone is on their side when it comes to changing, no matter what crime they committed.
Durham knows there will be many California officers who are not just skeptical, but downright hostile to that idea — he’s cognizant that it sounds like telling officers, “Hey, from now on you have to hug every inmate on your unit.”
But Durham believes the current system leaves inmates without enough autonomy to learn how to be different. Everything is done for them or to them. He uses the grocery store inside Halden as an example. In the U.S., meals come and go on a tray, no effort required. In Norway, many facilities only provide one pre-made meal a day. Prisoners are encouraged to buy groceries, make food for themselves, share meals with officers and fellow inmates and clean up afterward.
U.S. prisons “are not teaching [inmates] any life lessons,” Durham said. In Norway, “they give them the ability to function in life.”
The same goes for officers, Durham said. Right now, U.S. corrections officers have few opportunities to interact with inmates other than keeping order and imposing discipline in part because rules often forbid getting too close. U.S. officers, Durham said, have to be trusted to act as mentors — like their Norwegian counterparts.
It’s that mutual respect that makes the Scandinavian model work. And it does work. Violence is rare at Halden.
I met an inmate named Roger (I am not using his last name for privacy reasons) in a prison auto shop. Roger was incarcerated for sexually abusing his daughter, he said.
A round-faced, bespectacled man, he was changing the oil on an Audi — largely unsupervised by officers — surrounded by tools that in the United States would be considered weapons: a hefty hammer, socket wrenches, saws, a drill. In the next room, other inmates were using power tools to cut wood.
An inmate at Halden prison works in an auto shop, largely unsupervised by correctional officers.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
As a child molester, Roger is the type of prisoner who typically would not be safe in a U.S. prison — always under threat of attack from other inmates and often looked down on by officers.
He’s the kind of guy that most of us have a hard time feeling empathy for. But one day in the not too distant future, Roger is getting out — as are most people who go to prison in the U.S.
At Halden, Roger said, he is learning“how to not think about my child like an abuser” would.
Norway, like much of Scandinavia, has a reputation for allowing the common good to frequently outweigh individual desires and demands. That philosophy presumably makes it easier to create a system that helps someone like Roger.
But U.S. culture prizes vengeance. How many times has some variation of “I hope you rot in prison” been uttered with righteousness in film and television?
Our culture wants wrongdoers to suffer, even at the expense of public safety. But as uncomfortable as it is to hear Roger talk about the help he is receiving, isn’t that what we should want? For criminals to stop seeing the rest of us as prey?
“It’s been a real good program,” Roger said. “I am starting on the ground floor and building up.”
Down a hallway I met David, who was from Lithuania and serving time for selling drugs. The lack of fear, of guards and other inmates, he said, took away much of the stress of being in prison. It allowed him the space to think about his future.
A cell inside Halden prison includes a window and a private bathroom. Though the door locks, the Norwegian model of incarceration seeks to normalize life inside prisons so that inmates can focus on rehabilitation.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
“I don’t need to be afraid that something will happen,” he said. “I don’t think I will come out a worse person. I feel I could come out better.”
Tiffanie Thomas, a San Quentin corrections officer who was on the tour, told me bringing this system to California “seems realistic.”
As a female officer who is often alone and outnumbered at San Quentin, she has long depended on relationships with inmates for her safety and theirs.
“We do a lot of this already,” Thomas said. “We just didn’t have the words to put to it.”
But, she added, relationships take time. If the state brings the Scandinavian model to California, it is going to require something that will, even if they support the model, make both prison officials and reformers unhappy:
More corrections officers.
A correctional officer checks out the ice cream freezer in the grocery store at Halden prison. The inmates are able to purchase their own groceries, including ice cream.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
Right now, there are too few officers on duty to spend any meaningful time with their charges. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has 21,220 correctional officers and a statewide prison population of 93,649 — though that is expected to drop by nearly 10,000 in coming years. At San Quentin, there are 833 rank-and-file corrections officers and 3,504 incarcerated people, according to CDCR.
Often, there are two officers assigned to more than 120 inmates, Durham said, and that can jump to 160 depending on the facility and the time of day.
Thomas said she has been in charge of up to 200 inmates at once. In Norway, each guard is responsible for a few dozen inmates at most — a number that has increased because of budget cuts, much to the consternation of both guards and management.
But to the officers I was traveling with, it was still unimaginably low.
Durham never dreamed of spending his life inside prisons. Who does?
A Central Valley kid, he joined the Navy to escape the expectation that he would follow his father into construction. At 18, he found himself married, with a son and getting ready to deploy. But his wife at the time was diagnosed with a mental illness — bipolar disorder, he said — in an era when such things were barely understood, much less talked about.
One day, she took too many muscle relaxers. While he was trying to help her, his baby son, crawling around their waterbed, swallowed a penny. Durham scooped everyone up and made it to the hospital, but it was a breaking point.
California correctional officers visit Halden prison. Gov. Gavin Newsom is planning to turn San Quentin prison into a model facility using Scandinavian principles.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
He left the military and moved back home and soon found himself a single father. He needed help and stability and a job in a place without many options. So he became a prison guard.
No regrets, he said. But “if it was me, alone, I probably wouldn’t do it. But I had to support him.”
The job has taken its toll. His first week, he witnessed a stabbing. His old-school partner barely said a word about it, he said. But then, that partner rarely said anything useful at all. He was left to figure out a foreign and brutal world largely on his own.
Over the years, there has been an endless flow of trauma. The first time Durham had to help lower a hanged man, he remembers the legs in his face, and being grateful for the strength to hold the man up, even though it was too late. More than 20 years later, he remembers that inmate’s name. Beale.
An inmate sits at a table at Halden prison.
(Javad Parsa / For The Times)
He knows there are “bad apples” in the profession and there are certainly too many instances of officers committing crimes and abusing their power. He’s also heard the criticism that it doesn’t matter if corrections officers like their job or not, because unlike inmates, they can leave whenever they want.
Even as we rightfully shrink our prison population and rethink policies that turned incarceration into an industry, the reality remains that prisons will continue to exist because society does demand accountability for committing crimes.
The Scandinavian model doesn’t promise to end crime or fix society’s problems. But it has answered an obvious if ignored question: If guards have no hope, how can prisoners?
Walking out of Halden down a gravel path at the edge of the forest, Durham told me it was “weird” to see corrections officers smiling and laughing at work. The visit gave him hope, though he knows that as it did in Norway, change will take decades in California.
Rain started to fall and the air took on the vibrant scent of moisture hitting earth.
Ahead of us, a man with a scooter walked with a man pushing a wheelchair, oblivious to our approach. I couldn’t tell if either or neither were inmates, but it didn’t seem to matter, to us or them.
For the first time, maybe in his life, Durham was relaxed inside a prison wall.
Inmates walk down a path. The natural setting of Halden prison, located outside of Oslo, is part of its rehabilitative ethos.
