San Quentin State Penitentiary, one of the most notorious and harsh prisons in the US, is the stage for a radical new method of treating the incarcerated population; new for America that is.

That's because SQ has adopted Scandinavian methods of rehabilitation that aim to protect the California public by turning convicts into neighbors.

Whether one believes prison should serve as a punishment or as enforced rehab, the reality of the matter is that most inmates will eventually rejoin society. In fact, 30,000 prisoners re-enter society every year in California alone.

The question as Governor Gavin Newsom saw it, was what kind of people does one want rejoining their society from incarceration?

As a statement, "Little Scandinavia," a project to turn prisons into places that allow criminals the opportunity to turn themselves into good neighbors, isn't taking place in some small out-of-the-way penitentiary where a policy trial could be closely studied without impacting the state prison bureaucracy, but in the biggest, baddest, and saddest prison in the state.

Opened in July 1852, San Quentin is the oldest prison in California. SQ's death row for male inmates is the only one in the state, and the largest in the US where until Newsom's tenure, it was equipped with a gas chamber. Charles Manson, along with dozens of other notorious criminals were housed there.

Governor Newsom hopes to replicate changes that recently took place at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Chester, where the entrance to the prison ward called Little Scandinavia is painted with colorful murals.

Inside, inmates have clean box showers with doors. A communal kitchen with skillets, pots, and even a bright blue Dutch oven, serves 54 people who are responsible for cleaning it after use. On the ground floor of the bloc, sofas colored green like unripe limes are arranged close together as part of Little Scandinavia's emphasis on congeniality.

Green semi ottomans, by no means out of place in an Ikea showroom, sit below rows of wall-mounted phones. Chester has job training programs that can work with inmates on instructions in 6-figure salary careers if they have a background, while other professions such as plumbing and electrical work are also taught there.

"Do you want them coming back with humanity and some normalcy, or do you want them coming back more bitter and more beaten down?" Gov. Newsom asked rhetorically, echoing the sentiments at Chester.

In a feature piece previewing the changes taking place at SQ, the LA Times went to Chester to interview the prison staff at Little Scandinavia and found they had been changed almost if not moreso than the inmates.

"I never once thought, as a correctional officer, I had the ability to change somebody's life. Never dawned on me whatsoever," Michael Tompkins, an officer at Chester, told the Times. "And that's when a lightbulb went off in my head… You recognize that when you have the ability to help someone, it feels good."

The epiphany for Tompkins came on a trip to Norway to learn about the prison system there. A Norwegian corrections officer asked him what a good day on the job was like, to which Tompkins answered, the ones when he can go home to his family safe and unassaulted.

The Norwegian replied that his good days on the job were when he was able to make a difference in someone's life.

This Scandinavian model and others like it have been adopted in heavily-blue California, deeply-red North Dakota, and always-purple Pennsylvania, and if it will work in SQ, it can work anywhere.

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