Justizzentrum Leoben

During law school, I worked at the Correctional Law Project, a legal aid clinic that provides legal services to federal penitentiary inmates.  I spent two or three days a week for a whole year working in Millhaven Institution, a maximum security facility in Bath, Ontario.  It’s got nothing on Justizzentrum Leoben, a prison in Leoben, Austria, which lawiscool.com is calling the world’s most luxurious prison.  Take a look:

 

 

 

 

More pics are available here.

It’s a far cry from the concrete, steel, and blue paint nightmare that is Millhaven Institution.  As I’m sure you can understand, there are few pictures of Milhaven Institution online.  I managed to find a couple on the National Parole Board website to give you a bit of a comparison.  

Security Check-In at Milhaven. You put your briefcase on the little conveyor belt and it is pulled into the machine to be x-rayed by a guard. People go through a seperate metal detector (not pictured).

Once you are through the Security Check-In you walk down a long sidewalk to this gate--which is actually a set of two gates. The guard from the Security Check-In radios to the gate controller that you are coming. The gate opens. You step in. The gate closes behind you and you wait for the next gate to open.

 

The NPB Hearing Room at Millhaven. It also functions as a board room for the institution when the NPB is not sitting.

 These pictures don’t really do the place justice.  It much more depressing than this pictures let on.  Lots of cinder blocks and institutional paint colours.  I understand the denunciation/deterrence purpose of incarceration but I’m inclined to think that if you don’t want inmates institutionalized–the process whereby inmates become comfortable only in the penitentiary and become fearful and confused outside–you should make prison resemble the real world at least a little bit.  I doubt this is very high on Correctional Services’ to-do list.    

On a side note, this post reminds me of the scene from Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You where Goldie Hawn’s character, a very liberal socialite, proposes that inmates be given their own interior decorators to design their cells.  I’m not going that far…