Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

The Politics of Freedom

The Domesticated Foxes of Bastøy

Veronique Aïcha considers the ideology of imprisonment.

“The cosmos screams. The concrete bears witness to the violence with which it was turned into a wall.”
Michel Houellebecq, Rester Vivant, 1991

April 11th 2024 marked fifty years since the release of the film Papillon, based on the thrilling book by Henri Charrière from 1969 about the penal colony Devil’s Island in French Guiana, upon which Charrière was once imprisoned. Fifty years after the release of the film, I visited another prison island, Bastøy in Norway, where I was guided around by its former director, Tom Eberhardt.

In recent years there has been much attention across the world upon this prison island because of Michael Moore’s documentary Where to Invade Next? of 2015, which extensively featured Bastøy as ‘the prison of the future’. Yet in The Netherlands, where I’m from, the island became well-known because of the praise of the writer Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019).

The entire island accommodates people sentenced to prison. After Devil’s Island, Alcatraz (San Francisco), and Robben Island (Cape Town), Bastøy is likely the most famous prison island in the world. More importantly, it is the only one on this list that is still in operation.

I arrive at Bastøy on February 6, 2024, at 10:30. It’s winter, minus 12 degrees Celsius, so there are few people outside. There are some scattered buildings that together resemble the idea of a village. The place even looks cozy. There’s an old church, and a building with a gymnasium whose entrance door has patterned glass panes. Compared to the gray prisons that became standard over the past two centuries, Bastøy seems like a significant advance.

As I walk through grassland with Tom, he talks about the breeding of rare horses, but he’s momentarily distracted by a fox that seemed to be approaching but ultimately decided to observe us from a distance. Tom mentions that there’s a family of foxes living on the island – immigrants: they once crossed the frozen lake, and have been living here ever since.

The geneticists Lyudmila Trut and Dmitry Belyayev have been breeding foxes in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk (New Siberia) with the goal of domesticating them since 1952. What intrigues me about this experiment is not how they managed to tame the foxes, but what they did with the foxes deemed not tame enough. Because aren’t the people brought to prison island Bastøy in the same boat as those foxes?

The fox on Bastøy mentioned in the article. Photo by Veronique Aïcha

Neither Moore nor Bregman doubted that Bastøy would be ‘the prison of the future’ where ‘most people are good’. What I wanted to know from the prison’s former director was whether this island is really so progressive compared to the Devil’s Island of Papillon – or are we just recycling old ideologies again?

I see people wandering around the island looking somewhat lost. The fact that I had to take two boats just to get to the island makes me also feel that I am far removed from society; the first sight I see being a covered wagon with a horse doesn’t help shake that feeling. Time has stood still here. I am thrown back in time. But so are the residents. Tom Eberhardt can tell fascinating stories about the vision of the prison island, and it’s thanks to inspiring individuals like him that visitors learn to look differently at the concept of ‘prison’ – how you can not only talk about it differently, but actually do it differently. And yet, the age-old dogmas, ‘work liberates’, ‘the innately virtuous human’, and ‘banishment is good’, seem just as deeply rooted here as in any other prison.

1. Work Liberates

“I must prove that I can be and will be a normal human being. Perhaps not better, but certainly not worse, than the rest.”
Henri Charrière, Papillon

Working, or generally having an active, purposeful life, is certainly important for every individual. So in itself, the idea of giving people work in prison, to prevent them falling into boredom, is not wrong. However, it is wrong if we do so because we pretend that their criminal activities have arisen out of laziness, as if they did not work hard enough to make something of their lives and therefore were compelled to commit bad deeds. The solution there is obviously to put people to hard work – which in some contexts seems very much like a form of modern slavery.

In thinking in this way, we completely ignore the strong correlation between crime and government policies. But we now know a lot about the strong correlation between poverty and crime, mental health problems and antisocial behavior, and general drug policy and prison population. It can be plausibly argued that if you implement political policies that widen the gap between rich and poor, criminalize drugs, and cut healthcare, the number of ‘criminals’ will inevitably increase. Eberhardt, who has watched the prison population in Norway change, told me, “Social trends have consequences for the prison population. In recent years we have seen a strong influx into the prison of people with mental health problems.” This higher influx of people with mental health problems into prison is evident throughout Europe, and possibly the rest of the world too.

In both Bastøy and the Netherlands, prison work is eagerly seized upon as a means for individuals to improve themselves. But the idea of eradicating crime through hard work is absurd. For a start, people imprisoned in the Netherlands earn less than a euro per hour, and about the same low rate in Norway, and in almost all other countries in Europe, too. Furthermore, the work available is very limited: woodworking, metalworking, supermarket shelf-stacking, painting, welding, etc – all are manual jobs.

Bastøy from a distance photo by Veronique Aïcha

2. The Virtuous Human

“Those who have not been exposed to the hypocrisy of a civilized upbringing react ‘naturally’ to things, as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are happy or unhappy, glad or sad, interested or indifferent.”
Henri Charrière, Papillon

One of the greatest advocates in the Netherlands for viewing humans as virtuous is preacher’s son Rutger Bregman. In his book Humankind, Bregman criticizes the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for promoting the ‘Killer Ape’ theory. He substantiates this claim with a quote from Kubrick from an interview with The New York Times: “I am interested in the brute and violent nature of man… because it is a true picture of him” (‘Nice Boy from the Bronx’, 1972). Bregman’s criticism stems from his desire to make the point that even the people on Bastøy are naturally virtuous, and that from a philosophical point of view, the Killer Ape Theory is unjustified. But Bregman himself relies on the notion of inherent moral righteousness – and he misinterprets Kubrick’s quote. When Kubrick speaks of ‘the brute and violent nature of man’, he’s actually referring to another of his films, A Clockwork Orange (1971), not 2001. In A Clockwork Orange the filmmaker explicitly used violence to be critical of modern government. Kubrick specifically seeks to demonstrate the hypocrisy of carefully constructed social systems that prove devastating for the underclass. He glorifies violence only to criticize these ‘social’ criminal justice systems, produced by the cultivated, virtuous human, because here Lady Justice is not so just.

The Roman goddess of justice, Justitia, was depicted with a sword in one hand, and scales in the other. Since the 16th century, statues of Lady Justice have also usually shown her as wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents justice based only on the facts, regardless of the person. But there is a lot of injustice in drafting the law, and in the practical implementation of criminal justice. So Lady Justice is indeed blind; blind to the illiterate people she locks up; blind to the people with mental disorders she incarcerates; blind to the discriminatory workings of the legal system; and blind to the poverty behind many convictions. In a progressive spirit, the criminal justice system should not be used merely to establish and punish individual moral culpability, but should also in its calculations balance the network of political, social, and cultural relationships that converge on an individual at both personal and societal levels. In the ideal situation, the legal system forms a bridge between the individual and society, and the balance of Lady Justice’s scales takes into account societal injustices.

3. Banishment is Good

“Nature has made me happy and good, and if I am not, it is the fault of society.”
J-J Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

The philosophy behind Bastøy is based on the idea of ‘human ecology’, Tom tells me. Human ecology examines the relationships between people and their natural, social, and built environments, through the concept that the quality of people’s lives and the quality of their environment are interdependent. Tom adds, “Those who do not care for nature will not care well for themselves.”

The eighteenth century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (of whom Bregman is very fond) believed that society corrupts people, and that people surrounded by nature will be good. It is because society corrupts people that we need a social contract. So Rousseau wrote the book The Social Contract (1762) for this very purpose.

The idea that society corrupts people predates Rousseau, though. Niccolo Machiavelli, for example, saw society as treacherous, and the ambitious prince had to learn to deal cunningly with it; Machiavelli wrote the world-famous book Il Principe about it in 1513. Just over a century later, Thomas Hobbes elaborated on this thought from Machiavelli in his book Leviathan from 1651. Rousseau then joined this line with his book Emile, or On Education in 1762. Essentially, Bastøy is a sublime continuation of the same old dogma; that banishment into nature will make a virtuous human being.

I find this remarkable for a prison thinking about human ecology, because don’t our political systems and social provisions also belong to the same ecosystem? So by removing people from it, you actually place them outside their natural human ecology! Or to put the point another way: crime always arises within a context, so we have to address the problem of crime from within its context.

House on Bastøy photographed through patterned glass by Veronique Aïcha

An Anchor for Change: Humanity as Social Being

Nominating islands as places of banishment where people in detention can live their lives freely is nothing new, it’s rooted in the colonial history of Europe: Australia and the United States were used as islands of banishment for people whom ‘civilised’ European society did not want to accommodate.

Around the same time that this idea of banishment was extensively used, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase ‘Survival of the fittest’. Spencer viewed society as an organism. If society is an organism, then what are we creating by establishing parallel societies on islands for people punished by judges?

The core idea of Bastøy is that you are banished to a place where you’re allowed to work hard to become a virtuous citizen. Thus the prison island of Bastøy is emblematic of old ideologies disguised in a modern guise, as is anchored in virtually all prison systems in Europe. The echoes of beliefs from the past linger.

Albert Einstein wrote in his essay ‘Why Socialism?’ (1949) that man is simultaneously a solitary and a social being: “As a solitary being, he tries to protect his own existence and that of those closest to him. As a social being, he tries to gain recognition and affection from his fellow human beings in society.” Bastøy creates an artificial dichotomy between man as a solitary and social being. This is no different from all other prisons: even the progressive prison island only produces solitary instead of social beings. It appears there may be a chance that you can successfully return to society as a social being, if you manage to be virtuous; but by confining certain humans to an island, with the sea as bars, this only widens the gap between man and society.

Prisons reduce people to solitary beings. At best they breed beings who mainly relate to their immediate fellow humans. This is precisely what’s wrong with prisons at the foundation. Man is not only a solitary being you can train for desired virtuous traits, but is also a social being who must constantly learn to relate to or in society. For incarceration to be truly progressive, there must be a radical shift towards an approach that centralizes human dignity and social connection for people in detention.

Just before departing the island, I speak to a man who has been imprisoned on Bastøy for some time. He tells me that he originally came from Rwanda. I ask him how it feels to be imprisoned in the best prison in the world. “It’s not Africa,” he replies. As I walked around the island, I kept feeling I didn’t belong there; but upon hearing the words of this resident, I realized they don’t belong there, either.

Veronique Aïcha is philosopher and head of social impact for RESCALED: rescaled.org.