In Norway, Christie visited Basty Prison. Compared to prisons in other nations, it is thought that the circumstances at this facility are lenient. What do the prisoners here at the prison think about it? Does the prison embody the ideals that Norwegians have for their judicial system? Bring quote from reading

When the Atrocities Hit Norway

At midday, 22 July 2011, when the clock passed 15.26, Norway became another country. A huge bomb exploded in the core government building. The area looked as if after war. Seven persons were immediately killed, more were in hospital, badly hurt. Hundreds of lives were probably spared because it happened in the middle of the summer vacation, and some minutes after official office hours. Terrorism had reached Norway. A search for explanations followed immediately: Maybe it was Muslim revenge for our participation io wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Or for reprinting those caricatures of Mohammed? If so, bad times would be ahead for our immigrant population. But then, as night drew closer, other alarming news: There were shootings at a summer camp for politically active young people from the Labour Party - the dominant Party in government. This took place at a tiny island in a lake an hour from Oslo. A tall man walking back and forth, systematically killing everyone he could find - young people in their teens. Without mercy, just killing anybody he saw. He saw many. The horror, despair, and sorrow that spread through the country needs an artist's hand to describe. I refrain, but point to one piece of news during the long night that brought some sort of relief to many among us: The offender was not an immigrant. He was a Norwegian, a very Norwegian-minded Norwegian. His acts were directed against our political establishment that accepts immigrants and refugees with a Muslim background. His was a one-man war from the extreme right. Thereafter we got the news that the Prime Minister was alive. Soon he was on radio and television. His statements expressed sorrow and despair, solidarity with the victims, but then, central to his words that night, and in the days and nights that followed; 'we will not meet these acts with vengeance and terror, but preserve our ideals for a democratic society'. Or, as one of the young survivors from the island expressed it a few days later: 'We will meet terror with roses'. With my wife I attended a memorial meeting outside the City Hall of Oslo three days after the atrocities took place. Oslo has 600,000 inhabitants. Estimates suggest that 200,000 of us were there.

The Crown Prince spoke, the prime minister spoke, the mayor of Oslo spoke, survivors spoke. I did not hear one sentence about revenge. Only roses in words and in reality. Nearly everyone had flowers in hands and later left them at a number of memorial points. The public transportation system had to be rearranged, so as not to destroy the monuments of flowers in the centre of town. Similar memorial ceremonies took place all over the country. And it continued. The import tax on roses was temporarily removed to get a sufficient supply to the country. Norwegians came closer to each other during these days. But then a central question arises: Will it be possible to preserve this spirit?

On Being Close

I grew up during the German military occupation of Norway. It was World War II. From when I was 12 to 17 German soldiers were a common sight in the streets of Oslo. In these five years I never had a conversation with a German soldier. Nor did I ever talk with a member of the Nazi party, the one led by Vidkun Quisling, perceived as the super-traitor. Except, of course, there was Asbj0m. He was my classmate, seated just behind me at school. He was physically handicapped with cerebral palsy. He was kind and nice and helpful. The children were once given the task of creating a historical play about how Norway got its constitution in 1814. Without hesitation we let Asbj0m have the major patriotic role of the person writing the draft of the constitution. The teacher disliked this strongly. A Nazi in that role! To us it was Asbj0m, not a Nazi monster, who got the role, one we knew from thousands of encounters. But with Quisling, the super-traitor, the case was clear. He was immediately imprisoned when the occupation ended, and later executed. So were 21 other Norwegians and 16 Germans. Only a tiny minority of the population protested against the re-introduction of capital punishment at that time. To the majority, those seen as monsters deserved nothing more than death. One of the problems that remained after the end of war and occupation was the horrors of the German concentration camps: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, horrors without end from a country once close to us. But then, posing a serious threat to our Norwegian self-image, it turned out that there had been concentration camps in Norway, with hundreds ofNorwegian guards actively participating in the killing and maltreatment. These were extermination camps for Yugoslavian partisans, some of the camps with death rates equal to the worst in Germany. As a young student after the war, I was asked to find out what sort ofNorwegian monsters had operated in these camps. I talked with a great number of guards who were sentenced for killing and maltreating the camp inmates - I found most of these guards in various prisons. I also talked with a similar number of guards who had not been sentenced for killing and maltreatment. I did not ask them why they behaved as they did, but asked them to describe their prisoners. The essence of my findings was that the killers never came so close to the prisoners that they saw them as human beings. They saw dirty, stinking, dangerous animals from the Balkans, exactly as the Germans described them. The non-killers had come closer. They talked with some of their prisoners, were shown photos of life with wife and kids back home in Yugoslavia. They began to see their suffering and to understand the prisoners' despair. The pr.isoners became human beings. In situations of severe stress, or when not seeing the others as human beings, trapped in places we do not control, many among us might be capable of committing gruesome acts, as was Later shown by both Milgram (I 974) and Zimbardo (2007). To the prison guards, the prisoners appeared as monsters, just as these Norwegian guards appeared to us after the war. Through my conversation with the Norwegian guards I was struck by the thought that, if I had been recrujted as a guard at the age of 16, and with a similar background to theirs, l might have become one of them. And my findings, Lbat these kjUers were not monsters, but relatively ordinary Norwegians like most ofus? How were these findings received in Norway? They were buried in a sea of hatred. Germans, the enemies, the occupiers, they could do such horrible thjngs. Not proper Norwegians. My findings blurred lhe divisi.on between black and white and was a hjghly unwelcome message in Norway. There was hardly any public interest in my findings. It took 20 years before my manuscript was published in the fonn of a book (Christie 1972). Additionally 40 yeais later the book was re-published. This time it was elevated to the status of a canon ofNonvegian sociological literature (Christie 2010a). It takes time to splinter monster images.

Ordinary People in Non-ordinary Situations

My thesis is: The Norwegian prison guards in the Norwegian concentration camps were not monsters. They were ordinary people in a non-ordinary situation. But how could all this happen in the Europe of that time? Gennany was the centre of culture in Europe; how can we explain these atrocities, the extermination of the unwanted? The fate of the Jews is still the most illustrative example. Part of the explanation here was tbe long, long process of creating a picture of the Jews as completely de-humanized. All the caiicatures of the evil looking Jews, bent over their piles of money, the money that brought other people bottomless debts. The Crystal Night i11 Gennany and Austria, 1,000 synagogues burning, Jews killed and losing everything they bad, and together with this the bonfires of books in the streets, books by Jewish authors and those deemed somehow different, degenerate and inferior. Then the ideology of the Aryans as the best of all races, born to rule. Later we have of course seen that Germai1y was not alone in holding such views. For al I sorts of colonizers a picture of 'the primitive man' has been a comforting one. After this systematic degradation, firstly of Jews, later of Eastern Europeans and others, these people were excluded from being seen as normal human beings. In Bauman 's tenninology (1989), they were seen as weeds to be removed from society - garden states - build on functional rationality. To weed out the dehumanized was not to kill in the ordinary meaning of that word. There was, in addition, another unpleasant element: Education was no guarantee against participating in appalling acts. The final solution to what was called 'the Jewish question' was decided at a famous meeting in Germany. As Michael Wildt (2003) writes of the Wannsee-conference in 1942, 'rarely had a meeting been convened with so many members with doctorate degrees'. Similarly, when the trains with prisoners arrived in the camps, there was always a medical doctor on the platform, to sort out those who were to be sent directly to the gas chambers, and those who would be permitted to work for a period before they met their death. If not a doctor, a dentist might prove to be sufficient. The killings in the extermination camps were also prepared in another way, again a medical one. Doctors were given the mandate to decide over persons in mental and other institutions. Was this patient a person with a 'life worth living'? Perhaps some persons were not to be categorized as humans at all? If so, it would be better to let them die so that food and resources could be used for more useful purposes. Handicapped people, and a gradually ever-widening circle of people with deviant life styles or attitudes, were seen as sick elements, a sort of cancer on what we could call the 'folk-body'. It was a medical task to heal that body. Executions became a political and medical tool. This brings me to the core of what has been both my personal and scientific interest throughout much of my life: The question of the conditions for, and consequences of coming close to others. It has to do with coming so close to the other, through life or art, that it becomes possible to recognize elements of common humanity in all sorts of people. The man behind the horrors in Norway on 22 July seems to have been an extraordinarily lonely person, one standing outside social life, a man forcing himself to remain an outsider, not seeing the others. A man blinded by his mission. The challenge ahead will be to see him as one of us. Once he was a child, maybe he is fond of birds. In all simplicity, it is my supposition that the more we are brought into positions that enable us to see each other as fellow human beings, the more we are under the control of that knowledge. We are then controlled by the whole set of norms ingrained in us throughout life on how to behave towards people of all sorts, from babies to old people. To see the other is to be captured in the web of norms that makes us human. The closer we come in this way to another person, the more inhibitions are created against handling that person in ways usually seen as unacceptable within the culture we belong to. Language is often a most useful barrier against seeing the other. Therefore some words on this.

Words can create bridges between people - beautiful and useful bridges which carry ideas, emotions and understanding back and forth. But words can also function as barriers to understanding. Some words are so big that they contain everything, and therefore nothing. We do not understand more when such concepts are used - we understand less and thus give room for manoeuvre to all sorts of authorities. 'Crime' is one of these words. We do not understand more by using this concept. Is crime in Norway increasing? It is a question without meaning. When I was a young man, homosexuality was called a crime, and severely punished. Nowadays in Norway, gay couples marry in city halls. Back in time abortion was a crime, now abortion pills can be bought in drugstores. But new dangers have emerged. The war against drugs is the most productive creator of 'criminals' in my country these days. Instead of joining the chorus of voices claiming that crime is on the rise, standing still, or going down, I believe it is more fruitful to say: Crime does not exist! We can not use one loaded word for so many acts. Acts are not, they become. For all acts, including those seen by most people as criminal, there are dozens of possible alternative understandings; bad, mad, evil, misplaced honour, youth bravado or political heroism. The 'same' acts can thus be understood within several parallel social systems such as the judicial, psychiatric, pedagogical, theological - or simply by meanings valid among family and friends. Social and/or physical distance is of particular importance when giving meaning to acts. Persons close to me are mostly not seen as criminals, I see them too well; understand the reasons for their acts. But family life is only one of several examples of social conditions of a sort that create resistance against perceiving acts as crimes and persons as criminals. 'Crime' and 'criminals' are strong terms with a considerable ability to stick to people. They obscure other understandings of the acts and the humans behind these labels. I have never met a person - who, when I come close - is just a criminal. They are, like most of us, a mixture of good and bad. Some, maybe all, are walking mysteries. But some might have committed and have been sentenced for something terrible, and then all other aspects are overshadowed by that act or the personality type he or she is found to be. Destructive words will often proliferate among the many professionals so central in defining how humans are to be understood and governed: The psychopath, the paedophile, the manic-depressive, the ADHD-child - the diagnostic manuals are filled to the brim. And how would I like the supposed behavioural expert to describe those they diagnose? I want them to be described as whole persons, in old-fashioned, pre-professional terms. Described so thoroughly that they will become unsuited for categorization.I want to know something concrete about what occurred, and about the people. Small words put together in small stories are particularly well suited to give us such knowledge. The big words from the toolbox of the professionals will often close both for insight into what happened and for informed social participation. But without their language, would experts lose authority? Yes

Neighbours

One of my earlier books (Christie 1975) had a title difficult to translate from Norwegian into English. It was 'Hvor tett et samfunn?' Maybe 'How tightly knit a society?' might be adequate, or 'How close to one another?' How close do we dare to come to one another in households, neighbourhoods, states, or globally? But are we able to choose any more? We are distanced from one another by modernity, by ideas of growth and material progress and the belief that the grass is greener and more tasty on the other side of the fence. And then, as we know so well, modernity and mobility are closely related. Increasingly, we move between districts and between countries. Gone are the times when we grew up, lived, and continued to live close to the house were we were born. At a farm close to Oslo, there are descendants of a family that has lived and worked there for 13 generations. Rather heavy to be born in such a place, with the expectations of continuation, but fine seen from the point of social control. People knew each other in such neighbourhoods. As a teacher from one of the valleys once told me - he had been born there and was now back home working as a teacher - 'I don't need to ask the first-graders on their first day in school where they come from. I can see it from "ganglaget" -the way they walk'. But those days are gone. The teacher was an exception to the trends of modernity by not having moved away from the valley and his old neighbourhood. The normal consequence of education is ignorance - ignorance about the local neighbourhood and local neighbours. Local knowledge dwindles while abstract knowledge increases. 'Kitchen academies', places where knowledge about local matters is shared, are replaced by all sorts of people from scientific academies. And then, inevitably, when neighbourhood spirit, local knowledge and local control moves out, police and behaviour experts move in with power and supposed knowledge. Neighbours are incapacitated in their functions as neighbours. The surroundings become invisible, maybe even dangerous. Thus is the ground prepared for external authority as the major agency of social control.

On Punishment

Back in the 1950s, some 30,000 cases were officially handled as 'crimes' in Norway. Now it is more than 260,000 (Statistics Norway 2010). This does not necessarily mean that the amount of unwanted acts has increased in this period. But it means that we now live under social conditions where most ofus have lost close contact with the acts and actors, and thereby also lost the possibility to create our own interpretations of what happened. In such a situation, the message of the necessity of law and order gets more interpretative power. So also does the demand for punishment. But here, again, there is a need for clarification of the words we use. Punishment, what do I mean? Let me explain by describing a trip to a small island in the Oslo-fjord. It was a beautiful day in May. Some birds had just come back from the South to spend the summer with us up in the North. A group of workers rested on the ground, enjoying the warm sun shining down on them and the farmland. I recognized one of them. Some years ago he had been sentenced for several very serious offences. The island was an open prison called Bast0y. Once upon a time it was a place for naughty boys. In my youth, boys were told they would have to go to Bast0y if they did not behave. Today it is considered one of the most lenient prisons, both in Norway and elsewhere. There have been journalists here from all over the world, describing the virtues of the place; no locked doors, life like that on an ordinary farm, good meals, sun bathing and swimming in the fjord. I was there to give a lecture to the prisoners and the staff. I have forgotten the topic, but not the last part of the session. I asked the prisoners: 'Having been here now, in this summer paradise, a place most Norwegians would find perfect for a summer holiday, how would you respond to an offer from the authorities to stay on here for some weeks after your prison time was over - just stay for a holiday?' A low rumble started in the crowd, then, loudly, from several voices came: 'never, ever!!' There are huge differences in the material standards and physical and mental suffering produced by different prisons. But they have one major feature in common; they are all places where suffering is the reason for your being there. Society, represented by a judge, has decided that you have acted in ways that makes it right to let you receive a quota of pain. Even paradise converts to a place for suffering and shame when the penal courts order you to go there. So, there is no danger in prison reform. A prison is a prison. But prisons are also a mirror of society. The Scandinavian countries are affluent, with ideals of equality and welfare for all. How far below usual standards can we let prisoners fall without damaging our identity as belonging to societies that have created welfare for all? Not far, I hope. My preferred definition of punishment is that it is pain, intended as pain. Penal law ought to be called pain law. The learned professors of penal law ought to be called professors of pain law. This clarifies the central element in the activity. What then about my own views on punishment and on penal courts?

Penal Courts, a Necessary Anomaly

Some would say: 'ln these welfare states of yours, why not abolish punishment and penal courts altogether? Can't you control what ought to be controlled in other, more civil ways? I agree and disagree. lt is an important ideal to create social forms where we do not need formal penal courts and the accompanying delivery of punishment; pain intended as pain. My social ideal i to work for a reduction in the amount of formal punishment used in my country. r have lhe good luck to Ii e in a state with a relatively small prison population. orway has 71 prisoners per l 00,000 inhabitants (International Centre for Prison Studies London). That is the normal level in Scandinavia. The USA ha 716 prisoners per 100,000. That high figure i not a orth American destiny, ince Canada bas 'only' 117 prisoners per 100,000. Prison figures reflect ocial organization. I am a minimali t not an abolitionist. 1 saw no reason to change that position after the atrocities of 22 July. And I am not alone in my caution regarding pu.nishment in situations like this. ewspapers and TV were filled with statements from urvivors in funerals and in public meetiugs. They had two common themes. One was deep sorrow the other the need for defence of the basic arrangements and values of our society. To change the e basic features of the country as a result of such acts would ha e been to give victory to the offender. We have no death penalty in orway. The maximum for murder is 21 years of imprisonment but persons seen as particularly dangerou might get a sentence called preventive detention. ln extraordiraary cases, and they are not many, the stay in prison can be extended to more than the 21 years each time in periods of five years. Each such extensiot1 would have to be decided by ordinary judge in ordinary court bearing . But i this not too kind? Should we not imprison for life? Or, to be certain and v. r ith future madmen in mind, sentence to life imprisonment without parole? Or we might go all the way and reintroduce the death penalty. I hope none of this wiU happen. Instead, as fom1uJated by a central spokeswoman for the victims outside the City Hall: 'Let us answer with roses not with engeance'. Or from one of the other : 'lf one man can cause so much by hatred, imagine how much we can create through love'. The mayor of Oslo put it like this: Together we will punish the killer. Our punishment will be more openness, more tolerance and more democracy'. These days of horror also i Uustrate an essential feature of Penal Courts: They are cool places. Emotion are kept to a miuimum. Participants are not allowed to present themselves as full human beings, but as character in a well-directed play. Training in Jaw is to a large extent a trained incapacity, it is an education in what is not allowed to be brought before the judge. A penal judge bas to decide on facts: did the accused do what she or he is accused of doing? And secondly, if pain is to be decided on, it is designed to balance interests. EquaJ cases are to be met with equal an1ounts of pain. But humans are not equal, not even twins when they

have lived for some time. People before the judge are made equal by limiting the amount of information admitted to the court. Penal courts are beautiful and valuable coustructions when seen as instruments for clarification of what happened, and when the task is to decide what, according to penal law traditions, is the just amount of pain to be delivered in a case. I know of no better system for that purpose. And then there is a particular reason for preserving the penal courts: Without penal courts, other, less suitable social bodies might be tempted, or forced, in a hidden way, to deliver some sort of pain, but then a pain uncontrolled by considerations of justice. This danger is accentuated by the present growth and strength of the many victim movements in modem society. Victims deserve to be listeued to. And much has been accomplished, particularly with more information to victims from police, from courts and from prisons. There is also now more room in some courts for victims to tell their whole story, unrestrained by legal conveutions regarding relevance. Victim movements are to be honoured for bringing victims' rights forward and for combatting professional monopolies. But there are also needs for limits. Victim movements might, through their present strength and insistence on rights for victims, damage valuable instruments available in traditional penal law and courts. Penal law might lose balance. If so, we lose peual law. The prosecutor gets the upper hand and the road is open towards a more punitive society. In this situation, it is important to see that there is another road open to the victim movements. This is a road towards elevated status for the victim in direct communication with the person, or system, that might have hurt her or him (Kirchhoff 1991, Christie 201 Ob).

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ANSWER The passage describes the authors visit to Basty Prison in Norway and reflects on the nature ... View the full answer