A group of US prison officials from North Dakota, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma recently traveled to Germany, touring facilities that, at first glance, might look more like a university campus than a prison. As the New York Times recounts, the inmates wore regular clothes, cooked their own meals, and even worked with animals. One deputy prison warden from North Dakota started cataloguing potential weak points she spotted at the maximum-security Tegel prison, at least from a US perspective, including cell windows that opened and inmates at work beyond the gate. Yet German prisons report lower violence and recidivism, with officials citing...