Welcome guys to episode 73 of Behind the Shield podcast. My name is James Gearing. And this week I bring to you a very different guests than many that we've had before. But another area that I've really wanted to explore in an area that I am not well versed in myself. I did not come from this background. I am not immersed in it at all. But it's an area that I want to deconstruct because it seems to be an area that we are not doing very well here at the moment.

And when I say here also the same model is being used in England, I'm sure many places over the world.

But the area is prisons.

Now, a statistics that I found startling was back in 1970, the US had about 350,000 prisoners incarcerated.

Today's stats are over 2.2 million prisoners. So as a very low-level mathematician, to me,

that seems like we're trending in the wrong direction. So I wanted to reach out to a country

that seems to have a very different way of doing things. I'm not saying that it's going to be

perfectly replicated if we put it in a different country. But I wanted to bring some new ideas

and sow some seeds again in this area too. And if nothing else for me, I wanted to talk to a man

who was in that system. So my guest is Tom Erberhardt. And if nothing else for me, I wanted to talk to a man who was in that system.

So my guest is Tom Erberhardt, and he is the governor of Bastoy prison just outside Oslo.

I saw his prison featured in a couple of documentaries, and we're going to talk about this, but long

story short, they use the model where they remove the

prisoners freedom, they're stuck on this island in the middle of a body of water, but they live

as a community. Now, these are people that have committed murders and high-level crimes. These are not

shoplifters and people found with weed on their person. And they have had a huge success by preparing these men and women to go back into society,

which is something that is going to happen to 95% of prisoners.

So the theory of rehabilitating these prisoners and trying to teach them a skill,

try and teach them a sense of community,

and then set them up for success when they leave prison. So when they move next door to us,

they're a functioning member of society, I think is a great concept and it makes perfect sense to me.

So Tom is a man who is, you know, running a system that does exactly that so we talk about the

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