"Why didn't they just... copy it?"
I almost quit.
I should be honest about this because the report is supposed to be honest and I've been honest about everything else so I should be honest about the fact that after the justice chapter and the coloured boxes chapter I went back to my quarters and sat on the floor and didn't write anything for two days.
Jenkins came in on the second day and asked if I was alright.
I said: "They know. They know what's wrong. They know what works. They have the data. They have the research. They have the evidence. And they keep building cages and feeding poison to their children and giving anxiety machines to their adolescents and spending trillions on the absence of a thing that costs nothing. They KNOW, Jenkins."
Jenkins sat down next to me, which is unusual for Jenkins.
"Maybe you're not looking in the right places," he said.
I told Jenkins that I'd looked in plenty of places and they were all terrible.
"Have you looked at all of them?" he said.
I had not looked at all of them.
Portugal.
In 2001, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. Approximately 1% of the population was addicted to heroin. One in every hundred humans. The streets of Lisbon had open drug use, discarded needles, and people dying of overdoses at rates that were shocking even by European standards.
They had been doing what everyone else does: criminalising drug use. Arresting users. Imprisoning them. Treating addiction as a crime rather than a health condition. And every year, the problem got worse.
Then they did something extraordinary. Not complicated. Not expensive. Just extraordinary in the context of how humans normally behave, which is to keep doing the thing that isn't working.
They decriminalised all drugs. All of them. Not legalised — decriminalised. The distinction matters. They didn't open heroin shops. They stopped arresting people for being addicted. Instead, they redirected the money they'd been spending on prosecution and incarceration into treatment, harm reduction, and social reintegration.
A human caught with drugs in Portugal is not charged with a crime. They're referred to a "dissuasion commission" — a panel typically including a doctor, a social worker, and a lawyer — who assess whether the person needs help and connect them with services.
Here's what happened:
Drug-induced death rates dropped to the lowest in Western Europe. From one of the highest to the lowest. HIV infections among drug users dropped by more than 90%. Drug use among 15-to-24-year-olds — the age group everyone panics about — declined. Prison overcrowding eased. The money saved on incarceration funded treatment that actually worked.
Twenty-five years of data. Not a pilot programme. Not a theory. A quarter-century of evidence from a real country of 10 million people.
I put the report down and looked at Jenkins.
"When did this happen?" I asked.
"2001," Jenkins said.
"And the other countries — the ones still arresting addicts and putting them in cages — they saw this?"
"Yes."
"And?"
Jenkins did the thing where he adjusts his glasses rather than answer a question.
"JENKINS."
"Most of them didn't copy it, sir."
Finland.
Finland effectively eliminated homelessness. Not reduced it. Not managed it. Not built slightly better shelters. Effectively eliminated it.
They used an approach called Housing First. The principle is so simple it's almost offensive: if someone doesn't have a house, give them a house. Don't make them get sober first. Don't make them get a job first. Don't make them prove they "deserve" housing through a series of bureaucratic checkpoints. Give them the house. Then, with a stable base, help them address everything else.
Every other country does it backwards. They say: get clean, get a job, get stable, then we'll give you a house. Which makes exactly as much sense as saying: learn to swim, then we'll let you near the water.
Finland gave people houses. Then provided support services — addiction treatment, mental health care, employment assistance — at the house. Where the person lives. Where they're stable. Where they can actually engage with help because they're not spending every unit of energy figuring out where to sleep.
The results:
Finland is the only country in Europe where homelessness is declining. Everywhere else it's increasing. They have a total of approximately 3,600 people experiencing homelessness in a country of 5.5 million — and most of those are in temporary situations, not chronic rough sleeping.
The cost: LESS than the previous system. This is the part that makes me want to scream. Shelter-based emergency response, hospital visits, policing, court appearances, emergency room admissions — the cost of managing a single chronically homeless person in the old system was more expensive than simply giving them a flat and a support worker.
They saved money. They saved lives. They had better outcomes on every metric anyone bothered to measure.
"Jenkins."
"Yes, sir."
"How long ago?"
"The national programme started in 2008."
"Seventeen years."
"Yes, sir."
"How many countries copied it?"
"A few have small pilot programmes. None at national scale."
I am going to break this pencil.
Norway.
I mentioned Norway in the justice chapter but I need to come back because the details are important.
Norway redesigned its prisons. Not cosmetically. Fundamentally. The underlying philosophy shifted from punishment to rehabilitation. The question changed from "how do we make this person suffer proportionally to their crime?" to "how do we make this person safe to return to the community?"
Halden Prison, which holds some of Norway's most serious offenders, looks like a college campus. The cells have windows, furniture, and mini-fridges. There are recording studios, woodworking shops, cooking classes. The guards are trained in something called "dynamic security" — building relationships with inmates rather than maintaining control through force. Guards and inmates eat together. They play sports together.
Every human I describe this to has the same initial reaction: "That's not punishment."
No. It isn't. That's the point.
The recidivism rate — the rate at which released prisoners commit new crimes — in Norway is approximately 20%.
In the United States, which runs its prisons on punishment, humiliation, isolation, and violence: 44 to 68%.
In the United Kingdom: approximately 48%.
In Australia: approximately 46%.
Norway spends more per prisoner per day than these countries. But Norway has far fewer prisoners — 56 per 100,000 people compared to 531 per 100,000 in the US — because the ones it releases stay out. The total system cost is lower.
The Norwegians were asked, by visiting officials from other countries, how they achieved these results. Their answer, as I understand it, was roughly: "We treat prisoners like people and prepare them for life outside. It's not complicated."
They've been doing this for decades. The results have been published in every relevant journal. Delegations visit from around the world, nod appreciatively, fly home, and change nothing.
I started making a list. Jenkins helped. It got long.
Education: Finland (again — they're on this list twice and good for them). Shorter school days, less homework, no standardised testing until age 16, teachers trained to the level of doctors and paid accordingly, and educational outcomes that consistently rank among the highest in the world. Children play more and learn more. At the same time.
Community emergency response: An organisation called Hatzalah, operating in Jewish communities worldwide, achieves average emergency response times under three minutes. THREE MINUTES. Centralised ambulance services average seven to fourteen. Hatzalah's model: community-embedded volunteers who live in the area they serve, dispatched by decentralised radio alert, no bureaucratic chain. They outperform systems that cost ten times as much because proximity beats bureaucracy.
Worker cooperatives: Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain. A network of cooperatives employing over 80,000 humans where workers own the company, elect management, and vote on major decisions. Pay ratios between highest and lowest are capped at 6:1 (compared to 300:1 or more in typical human corporations). They've been operating since 1956. Through recessions, financial crises, and every objection economists have thrown at them.
Gross National Happiness: Bhutan. A small nation-state that decided, in 1972, to measure national success not by economic output but by the wellbeing of its citizens. They literally redesigned their policy metrics around the question: "Are the humans flourishing?" They're not perfect. No one on this list is perfect. But they asked the right question, which turns out to be most of the battle.
Indigenous knowledge systems: Multiple human cultures — Aboriginal Australians, various First Nations peoples, Māori — maintained sustainable relationships with their environments for tens of thousands of years using knowledge systems that Western science is only now beginning to recognise as sophisticated. Circular time. Reciprocal land management. Community-embedded justice. They didn't have a word for "sustainability" because the concept of not sustaining would have been incoherent.
Here is what the list tells me.
Every problem in this enclosure — every single one I've documented in the previous chapters — has been solved somewhere.
Addiction: solved in Portugal. Homelessness: solved in Finland. Recidivism: solved in Norway. Education: solved in Finland. Emergency response: solved by Hatzalah. Worker exploitation: solved by Mondragon. Measuring what matters: solved by Bhutan. Living sustainably: solved by Indigenous cultures for millennia.
Not solved perfectly. Not solved permanently. Not without new problems emerging. But solved functionally, measurably, demonstrably, with data, at scale, over time.
And the rest of the species — the 7.9 billion humans NOT living under these models — looked at the evidence and, with few exceptions, did not adopt it.
I've been thinking about why. It's kept me up at night because it seems so irrational that there must be something I'm missing.
Here's what I think is happening. Three things.
First: identity. Humans attach their sense of self to their systems. "We are a nation that is tough on crime" is not a policy position. It's an identity statement. Adopting Norway's model would require not just changing a policy but changing a self-concept, which is psychologically much more expensive. They'd rather have a 50% failure rate that feels like "who we are" than a 20% failure rate that feels foreign.
Second: the people who benefit from the broken systems. This is less comfortable to write but it's true. The legal industry benefits from distrust. The pharmaceutical industry benefits from chronic illness. The prison industry — and in some of their countries, prisons are operated by private companies for profit, which is so grotesque I initially thought Jenkins was joking — benefits from recidivism. The coloured box companies benefit from anxiety. When a system's failure is someone's revenue stream, fixing the system is an economic threat.
Third: they don't believe it's possible. Decades of the coloured boxes telling them everything is terrible has produced a species-wide learned helplessness. They've been trained — environmentally, through constant exposure to failure and conflict and despair — to believe that things can't be different. That suffering is inevitable. That trying is naive.
This is the cruelest trick of all. The anxiety machine didn't just make them sad. It made them believe that sadness was realistic and hope was foolish. It took the most adaptable, creative, problem-solving species on the planet and convinced them they couldn't solve problems.
They can. The evidence is right here. Some of them already did.
(Pencil note, middle of page, written larger than usual:
This changes my entire approach to the sanctuary design.
I was thinking I had to invent solutions. I don't. The solutions exist. They've been tested. They work.
My job is not to design a new civilisation. My job is to copy the homework from the humans who already got it right, put it all in one place, and refuse to let the rest of them pretend they didn't know.
The answer was always in the question.
It was also always in Portugal, Finland, Norway, Spain, Bhutan, and about fifty Indigenous cultures they tried to destroy.
— A)