If you are going to escape for a luxurious island prison, the coolest way you can possibly do it with on a surfboard with a little plastic shovel.
Norway isn’t exactly known for its tough prison life. When someone gets chucked in the clink, ending up in Norway’s Bastoy Prison isn’t a terrible fate. No walls, no fences, and certainly no solitary confinement. In fact, there are tennis courts and a sauna, and since the whole prison is on a tiny island, there are beaches for the prisoners to build sand castles on. It’s a Scandinavian Alcatraz, and it sounds pretty damn good. Norway’s government doesn’t do the whole punishment thing at Bastoy–instead, they’re believers of rehabilitation.
But for one young Norwegian, a forced vacation wasn’t something he was in to. He paddled his way off the island on a surfboard, using a toy plastic shovel as a paddle. What a surfboard and a toy shovel were doing in a prison, even one as nice as Bastoy, isn’t clear. The inmate has yet to be found, and the fact that there was a surfboard at the jail he’s at is clear evidence that he is an idiot for leaving.
The prison is interesting: although it houses rapists and murderers and other terrible people, it affords its inmates a pretty crazy amount of freedom. And if they do escape (and are caught), they’ll usually end up in a much shittier, much more real prison, one that is sure to frown on the presence of surfboards within its walls. And guess what? It’s working.
Escapees are usually placed in one of Norway’s high-security facilities, which don’t have saunas or even tennis courts, if you can believe that. And here’s the cool part: it’s working. According to Time Magazine, Bastoy’s recidivism rate (a criminal’s relapse back into raping or murdering or stealing cars or whatever) is only 16%. The U.S.’s? 43%. Nearly half. That’s bad.
But if you are going to escape for a luxurious island prison, the coolest way you can possibly do it with on a surfboard with a little plastic shovel.
