This month, Norway marked the 80th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi Germany, and the United States will commemorate the same anniversary of World War II ending in September.
One unexpected outcome from the conflict is the role prisoners of war camps played in prison policy. For Norway, POW camps planted a seed of human dignity that decades later blossomed into the principle of normality to guide the treatment of approximately 3,000 prisoners today.
The U.S., however, didn’t take away the same lessons. Though WWII provided the U.S. government with an international playbook for treating POWs with human dignity, our legislators and judges relied on a phrase from an 1871 Virginia Supreme Court decision viewing prisoners as merely “slaves of the state” as domestic policy.
Why should it matter to us today?
I teach a course at the University of Virginia titled “Education Inside U.S. and International Prisons.” This spring, 18 UVA students, a Batten School administrator and I traveled to Oslo to learn about Norwegian prisons.
“Wait, what? A prison?” is the usual response. Why would anyone travel to a beautiful country to see an ugly institution Nathaniel Hawthorne described in “The Scarlet Letter” as “the black flower of a civilized society”?
The answer is twofold.
First, Americans’ and Europeans’ interest in one another’s prisons is nearly 200 years old. Alex de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, for example, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to visit our prisons and published their findings in “On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France” in 1833. Between 1870 and 1950, Americans and Europeans traveled to Cleveland, London, Rome and Washington, D.C., to learn about international prison practices. Organizations such as the ARrow Center for Justice and Amend took stakeholders to visit prisons on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in 2023-24.
Our UVA trip to Norway this spring continues this tradition.
Second, Norwegians use their WWII memories as a public policy prompt to reimagine prisons. Why? The Nazis established more than 600 prison camps throughout Norway during the occupation. Approximately 44,000 Norwegians were among the 150,000 people incarcerated during wartime. Of the nearly 2,100 Jews living in Norway, the Nazis deported 773 to concentration camps in 1942. Only 38 Jews survived.
The horrors Norwegians experienced during WWII encouraged a generation to reimagine its country’s ideology for punishment. As the authors of “The Norwegian Prison System: Halden Prison and Beyond” detail, future prime minister Einar Gerhardsen and members of Parliament drew on their experiences of imprisonment by the Nazis to lay a post-war conceptual framework for humane treatment rather than dehumanization. Today this framework includes well-resourced correctional officers and a “punishment that makes a difference” vision statement. Nevertheless, the prison system is not without challenges.
How does all of this relate to America in 2025?
As our own WWII anniversary approaches, it’s time to look back on our philosophy of imprisonment for POWs then, and consider it anew for incarcerated Americans now.
Though many Americans have likely forgotten, the Geneva Convention of 1929 governed our treatment of more than 400,000 prisoners of war — nearly 350,000 Nazis — living in POW camps in the U.S. from 1942-45. Virginia had 17,000 POWs. Overall, POWs ate nutritious meals daily, earned a paycheck for their work, enrolled in free education classes — and drank beer. Compare this to the less-than-humane treatment of 120,000 Japanese sent to U.S. internment camps, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, by Washington leaders. Compare POW treatment to that of 100,0000-plus American citizens incarcerated in state and federal prisons and jails during WWII, or to the treatment of the 1.9 million incarcerated today.
In the end, incarcerated Nazis received better treatment on U.S. soil than incarcerated American citizens, regardless of race. We should reflect on that experience to break the cycle of dehumanization so common in too many U.S. prisons in 2025.
Gerard Robinson is a professor of practice at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
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