In September 1999, the Australian Institute of Criminology ran a round-table seminar on Public Health Perspectives on Interpersonal Violence. Crime is a public health issue. It shares common causes with ill-health, particularly the trauma resulting from disadvantage and poverty. Fear of crime is itself a cause of anxiety. Community development in education, parental education, and among minorities reduces crime and promotes better health, for example in reducing the effects of alcohol and illicit drugs. Interpersonal violence is widely accepted as a public-health problem rather than a matter for the criminal justice system. At an international level, violenceis a focus of the work of the World Health Organisation and the United States Government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The book The Elephant's Tooth: Crime in Alice Springs points out the importance of having a strong focus on the well-being of populations, along with use of public health data, to aid in the understanding of the underlying problems of crime and identifying solutions. In doing so, public health can make a substantial contribution to crime prevention and can cover a much
broader spectrum than can the criminal justice system alone.
Seeing crime as part of the injury/trauma field of public health, with its focus on population-level risk factors, highlights the importance of intensive, intersectoral approaches to preventing and dealing with crime.
Ny Anstalt
In Rafael Rowe’s TV series World’s Toughest Prisons, the episode Greenland, Prison in the Ice, shows a new state-of- the-art prison. Ny Antalt is located in Nuuk, the capital of
Greenland. The architecture is modern and features clean lines in Corten steel, concrete and glass that look out onto panoramic views. The cubes it consists of are stacked so that prisoners can see beyond the prison walls, and are decorated with nature-inspired designs by an Indigenous artist. This allows prisoners to enjoy the Northern light.
The prison, built by the Danish firms Friis & Moltke and Schmidt, Hammer Lassen, operates like a village. Nestled in the Arctic landscape with views of fjords and mountains, it could easily be mistaken for an eccentric modern villa. This humane prison emphasises rehabilitating through positive design. However, it is more than an architectural achievement: it seeks to address and end a human-rights issue that has haunted Greenland for decades. It is designed to relax and disarm. Prison guards are members of Nuuk’s community, and although newly arrived prisoners must strip and are frisked, the guards shake hands with every new prisoner and introduce themselves.
Prisoners are locked up in the cell block from 6 pm and in their cells from 9 pm. The daytime is filled with therapy, education, and rehabilitation activities. Prisoners who behave well are allowed to work outside the prison during the day to get used to having a job. The prisoners
have “prison phones”, mobile phones without a camera or an internet connection. They can call their friends and family with this and can receive calls from them any time.
These calls are monitored. The prisoners are allowed to have visits from friends and family and to cook for them. For exercise, the prisoners shovel snow in the community or on the prison grounds. If they behave well,they are invited to go on hunting trips to stay in touch
with their heritage. Seal meat is butchered on the spot and taken back to the prison.
There are few guards on duty at any time. They mainly stay back in the high-tech control room, where the whole complex is visible on monitors. Lights and
locks can be controlled from this area. The design itself has been used to manage security at the facility. The complex is designed over three levels which allow the guards to manage the flow of people between different areas and control which prisoners encounter each other.
This reduces the possibility of violence. The guards do not carry weapons, which means they can develop better relationships with the prisoners. This is essential to the
prisoners’ rehabilitation.
Ny Anstalt's running costs are around US$150,000 per prisoner per year. For those with shorter-term sentences, it offers a greater chance of successful rehabilitation.
Nuuk is a small community, and eventually, the prisoners must return to that community. For this to be successful and to prevent future crime, this modern prison strives to promote change in each individual offender.
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