Каковы тюрьмы в Норвегии?

What are prisons in Norway really like?

The entrance to Skien high security prison in southern Norway is as foreboding as any that might be imagined. The grey concrete walls are high and bleak – and appear even more austere against the backdrop of the blazing colours of the autumnal Norwegian forest close to which it has been built.

I have been invited to visit the prison by a teacher who works here. Leif, a gently spoken bear of a man, has been in teaching for more than 20 years – it runs in his family he tells me. "My father was a teacher," he says, "and so was my grandfather." I step through the Judas gate at the side of the main gateway and immediately I feel the weight of confinement. In the UK we call this part of a prison the "sterile area" - no prisoners allowed anywhere near it.

I follow Leif through other smaller steel gates as we make our way up a sloping, winding path that is bordered, perhaps a little incongruously, by flowerbeds and bright shrubs. An eerie peace hangs over the buildings. "The prisoners are all locked in their cells," explains Leif, "but they will be going out on the exercise yard soon, perhaps you would like to join them?"

It is an interesting suggestion, one I'm not too sure about at first. I remember my own time in prison and the discomfort that I and others felt when people from the outside came to "have a look around". It was fine if they engaged and interacted with us, recognising that we too were people. But when that didn't happen there was a real sense of intrusion, of being gaped at, as if we were animals in a zoo.

Meanwhile Leif takes me to the staff canteen. Prison guards are having a break, and a senior officer joins us, a broad-shouldered, tough looking man, with close-cropped hair and a clipped moustache. Leif explains that the man is the officers' union rep. He appears a little suspicious of me at first, but soon relaxes and we chat amiably. I tell him that in Britain we have a view that Scandinavian prisons are among the most progressive in Europe, "but what I've seen so far reminds me very much of the high security prisons that I have experienced at home". He smiles. "It's a prison," he says. "You would know it if you were in here."