42. Knut Sorenson:What’s it like to work in a Norwegian prison?

Some events are so painful, so shocking that they are difficult to think about, to face up to. This conversation is inevitably tainted with the horror at Utøya ten years ago this summer but Knut focusses on the people and the systems that dealt with the immediate aftermath. The prison managers, the officers, the politicians.

Knut Sorenson has worked for 28 years in the Correctional Service in Norway, educated and served as a prison officer for eleven years,  he started as a teacher at the University College of Norwegian Correctional Service. He is also a sociologist and now a phd candidate in criminology at the University of Oslo.  His recent research concerns the effects upon prison staff of working with a very high profile prisoner Anders Breivik as described in his paper Prison officers’ coping strategies in a high-profile critical situation: Imprisonment after the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway