Staten Prison is the high-security prison at the center of several connected strands of the novel: Sonny Lofthus’s incarceration, Arild Franck’s abuse of authority, and the danger posed by the prison’s own security systems. Though presented as a place of containment, Staten is also a setting where access, information, and protection can be manipulated from within.

Setting and Role

The prison is referred to as both Staten Maximum Security Prison and Staten. Sonny is held there, and Franck serves as its governor. The institution becomes a point of contact between prison life and criminal activity outside its walls: prisoners have worked for Hugo Nestor, while information about Sonny’s movements and suspected crimes circulates among investigators beyond the prison.

Staten’s security is not simply a physical barrier. A prisoner describes the fear that someone in the control room might unlock a cell and expose its occupant to other inmates. The possibility that staff can control access from a distance turns a routine safeguard into a source of danger, and the prison’s apparent order is shadowed by suspicion about who can use its systems and for what purpose.

Franck’s Authority and Prisoner Vulnerability

Franck uses his position as governor to pressure prisoners. He recounts the death of a prisoner in cell 317, a man believed to have worked for Nestor, and links the man’s possible knowledge to concern that he might talk. Franck presents the death as a warning to a silent boy, while also acknowledging that there was no evidence behind the concern. He says he dislikes deaths in cells at his prison because they invite scrutiny, revealing that institutional accountability matters to him alongside the use of intimidation.

Franck also tries to force information from Johannes Halden by grabbing his shirt and threatening to stop his cancer treatment unless Halden reveals where Sonny is. He dismisses medical confidentiality, claiming to have eyes and ears everywhere. Halden refuses to submit to the threat and answers that he has lived long enough, has no one waiting outside, and believes his sins have been forgiven. In this encounter, the prison’s authority over a vulnerable inmate’s care becomes a lever in Franck’s pursuit of Sonny.

Sonny, Security, and Outside Investigations

Staten’s relationship to events beyond the prison is complicated by Sonny’s movements. Investigators discuss a killing for which Sonny was suspected even though he was imprisoned at the time: he had been out on day release, was in the area, and one of his hairs was found at the scene. The Buskerud officer leading the investigation had not made that connection public. The detail shows how the prison sentence does not fully establish where Sonny was, and how information about him is selectively controlled outside Staten as well as inside it.

The institution’s staff and routines also provide opportunities for someone to approach it under a disguise. Morgan Askøy, a prison officer who has worked at Staten for two months, arrives with a group of officers and is joined by a man in a prison-officer uniform whom he does not recognize. The encounter introduces uncertainty into the ordinary passage of staff through the prison’s entrance: a uniform and a greeting can suggest familiarity without proving identity.

Internal Corruption and Narrative Significance

The clearest rupture of Staten’s institutional order occurs when Sonny, after killing several people including Franck’s criminal associates, binds Franck to his office chair with duct tape. Franck reflects that he had watched Sonny grow up in the prison and had not considered him capable of violence, apart from one incident involving Halden. That contrast between the boy Franck thought he knew and the armed man before him makes the prison a witness to Sonny’s transformation as well as a place that failed to contain it.

Sonny searches Franck’s pockets and takes his wallet and car key; reading the key, he remarks on Franck’s Porsche Cayenne as an expensive car for a civil servant. The exchange brings suspicion of corruption into the governor’s own office. Staten is therefore more than a backdrop for imprisonment: its authority can be weaponized against inmates, its security can be approached through deception, and its senior official becomes vulnerable within the institution he governs. These episodes make the prison’s promise of control inseparable from the question of who controls it.