The stories of Kalief Browder, Layleen Polanco, and others have come to solidify Rikers Island as a symbol of the failings in New York’s criminal justice system. The notorious prison island has earned a reputation for systemic violence and disfunction that continues to haunt detainees long after they’re released.

But New York City is taking steps to change that deep-seated culture of violence, and move away from the conditions of the 84-year-old facility. A major piece of that puzzle is the de Blasio administration’s proposal to shutter Rikers Island and replace the complex with new, more humane jails in four boroughs by 2026. That plan is currently in the last leg of the city’s land use review process.

A big component of that change is the design of these spaces, which is intended to foster an environment that’s more humane for inhabitants of the jails, and better equipped to help incarcerated people transition to life after imprisonment. As officials mull how best to overhaul the city’s correctional facilities, a question arises: How can New York City use design and architecture to build spaces that rehabilitate and not just punish?

Officials with the de Blasio administration are hoping that comparing the city’s jails to ones overseas might help answer that question. Some of those officials will participate in a delegation to Oslo, Norway and Amsterdam, Netherlands to visit six correctional facilities over the next week. The goal is to learn from their design and operations to inform the framework of the proposed borough-based facilities, according to the Major’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ).

“We’re really seeking to transform New York City’s justice system and this is a moment in which we should try to learn every lesson that we can,” Dana Kaplan, MOCJ’s deputy director, tells Curbed. “It’s not just about four new facilities, but it’s really about thinking as innovatively as possible about design and what do these facilities look like. It’s an opportunity to really further the city’s culture change efforts.”

The seven-day trip, which is being paid for through private funds by a number of justice-focused foundations, will also be the first meeting with the Norwegian Correctional Service in what could be an ongoing partnership with New York City through the Amend program, started by faculty at the University of California San Francisco to support culture change within American jails.

All but one of the jails that officials will visit during the trip are in Norway. Among those complexes is one just outside Halden, Norway known as Halden Prison, the maximum-security facility Time dubbed “the world’s most humane prison” and what The New York Times describes as embracing “radical humanness.”

Some of these European facilities can look more like college campuses than jails. At Halden, for instance, there’s a surplus of greenery and open space, and no barbed wire on the exterior walls. Instead of bars, reinforced glass is used to allow for greater natural light in common areas. Similarly, cells feature long vertical windows to maximize that natural light, with views of the grounds that give detainees a greater sense of the passage of time and the seasons. The design also encourages guards to mingle with inmates. Shared living and food preparation spaces also make for an experience that’s closer to normal life.

“The construction of these buildings is focused on, how can elements of design and how can the physical space that people are in help them to achieve more while they are incarcerated?” says Brie Williams, the director of the criminal justice and health program at the University of California San Francisco and a professor of medicine who helped create the Amend program.

And these facilities are working for Norway: The country has a prison population of fewer than 3,500, and recidivism rates that are among the lowest in the world. The Dutch jail system has similarly noteworthy stats. Comparatively, New York City has recently seen historic dips in its jail population, but still has some 7,800 detainees in its jails with an incarceration rate of 136 per 100,000 adults. America as a whole jails 665 per 100,000 citizens. Those figures are why U.S. prisons and state correctional departments, such as in North Dakota, have sent delegations to Norway to learn from their successes.

How have these countries achieved these systems? It’s a complicated question, but one part of the answer is a fundamentally different approach to incarceration than in the U.S.—one that departs from how New York City has long operated its jails.

“[Norway’s facilities are] born out of a belief that people go to court to get punished, [and] they go to prison or to jail to become a better neighbor, so every single contact with anybody in a prison or a jail should be 100 percent only focused on helping them to change their lives for the better,” says Williams. “There’s a very different approach to corrections that’s really focused on health and well-being and focuses on people. People are at the middle of everything.”

That’s also at the heart of how these spaces are designed. But you can’t build new facilities without changing the culture and “expect it to be enough,” Williams points out. And the same goes for New York City, whose officials do see the components as interconnected.

“If we replicate the conditions of the Rikers facilities in these new buildings, then we really haven’t accomplished much,” says Jamie Torres Springer, the first deputy commissioner at the Department of Design and Construction. “Environment drives behavior and that’s really the touchstone in how we’re approaching the need for high quality design in the borough-based jails.”

The opportunity to explore facilities in Norway and the Netherlands will allow New York City officials to zoom out and look at the big picture before embarking on lasting reforms to the city’s system, according to Stanley Richards, acting-vice chair of the New York City Board of Corrections and executive vice president at The Fortune Society, a nonprofit that supports reentry from jails and prisons and advocates for alternatives to incarceration.

“For me, this is really an opportunity for us to get out of the operational, sort of New York City-level perspective about what we need to do moving forward,” said Richards. “[This] gives us an opportunity to really step back and look at it from a 10,000 foot perspective.”