Does this look like a state park or resort to you? Well, it’s not.

It’s dubbed the most humane prison on earth – a maximum security prison, in Halden, Norway, where the inmates live better than American citizens can even hope to live on the streets of Baltimore, MD, Detroit, MI, or Philadelphia, PA.

“Every inmates in Norwegian prison are going back to the society,” Are Hoidel, Halden’s director[.].. “Do you want people who are angry — or people who are rehabilitated?”

Like many prisons, Halden seeks to prepare inmates for life on the outside with vocational programs: wood-working, assembly workshops, and even a recording studio.

Norway hasn’t imposed the death penalty since 1979. Life sentences don’t exist, putting the focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment.

The Scandinavian country has an incarceration rate of 70 per 100,000, totaling 3,571 inmates for the entire country. The US’ rate is more than 10 times Norway’s — 707 per 100,000, or 2,228,424 people behind bars.

Something is seriously wrong with the US, and Americans need to wake up and see the light of day.

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A splash of color…

a little sports…

A common lounge, where they can watch tv and play a little XBOX 360 and some Playstation 2 or 3…

it even has a recording studio where inmates can create music, which presumably they perform for each other and sometimes the outside world.

and last but not least, a friendly rapport with the “guards,” not a severed spine or a broken leg like Americans get from their “police,” for merely being suspected of a crime on their own streets.

“The relationship with some inmates, it’s kind of like a normal friendship,” one guard explains. “Last year, we had one inmate who was crying when he was leaving.”

They must have been told they were being released to slums of Baltimore, MD or the ghettoes of Detroit, MI.