A Beautiful Prison (September 2020) is a sound-rich, history-steeped documentary about why Greenland opened its first ever conventional closed prison in 2019.



It is part of Rulebreakers, a series produced by early-career radio producers and available to listen at  BBC’s The Documentary podcast.

Greenland has been detangling its colonised relationship with Denmark since World War Two. Along the way, each state service and law needs to be rewritten. In 1948, three young Danes were sent to research and write Greenland’s first Criminal Law. They hoped they were writing a blueprint for the world’s first modern prison-less society. Intead their social experiment put the nation in a 70-year-long limbo.