Menendez brothers lead prison beautification project inspired by Norway penal system
The Menendez brothers — who were given a new shot at freedom 35 years after gunning down their parents — have been working on a beautification project in prison that’s designed to mimic the more humanitarian conditions in the Norwegian penal system.Erik and Lyle Menendez, convicted of the 1989 shotgun murder of their parents, have been trying to improve the San Diego prison where they’ve been incarcerated for the past six years and are serving life sentences.Prior to that, the killer siblings had been in separate facilities since 1996.In 2018, Lyle, 56, launched an initiative called Green Space, at the Richard J.
Donovan Correctional Facility.His younger brother, Erik, 53, is the lead painter for a massive mural illustrating San Diego landmarks.Scenes of “America’s Finest City” will eventually cover the inside perimeter of 40-foot concrete walls inside the prison’s Echo Yard.“This project hopes to normalize the environment inside the prison to reflect the living environment outside the prison,” Pedro Calderón Michel, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said Friday.
The brothers are awaiting resentencing after spending more than 30 years behind bars for the grisly slaying of their parents, Jose and Kitty, in their ritzy Beverly Hills mansion.The case captivated the nation and spawned Ryan Murphy’s popular Netflix series three decades later.Green Space borrowed from the design of Norwegian prisons.
Norway believes in a more humane system of incarceration, which involves giving inmates more rights and nice environs in which to live.Small prisons dot the countryside, which permits inmates to serve their sentences close to home, said Kristian Mjåland, a Norwegian associate professor of sociology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.There are roughly 3,000 people imprisoned in Norway, he added, which means the nation’s per-capita incarceration rate is roughly one-tenth that of the Unit...