Norwegian Justice and Anders Breivik [David Zincavage]

Students at Yale and Harvard don’t get single rooms as nice as the rooms at Norway’s maximum security Halden Prison

If you’re planning to murder 76 people, be sure to do it in Norway. The maximum penalty in that enlightened Scandinavian country is theoretically 21 years.

However, as this Wikipedia article explains, convicted criminals customarily serve only a portion of their sentences.

The maximum determinate penalty is 21 years imprisonment, but only a small percentage of prisoners serve more than 14 years. Prisoners will typically get unsupervised parole for weekends etc. after serving ⅓ of their sentence (a maximum of 7 years) and can receive early release after serving ⅔ of their sentence (a maximum of 14 years). In 2008, to fulfill its requirements under the Rome Statute, Norway created a new maximal penalty of 30 years for crimes against humanity.

The maximum indeterminate penalty, called “containment” (Norwegian: forvaring), is also set at 21 years imprisonment, and the prisoner is required to serve at least 10 years before becoming eligible for parole. “Containment” is used when the prisoner is deemed a danger to society and there is a great chance of committing violent crimes in the future. If the prisoner is still considered dangerous after serving the original sentence, the prisoner can receive up to five years additional containment. If the additional time is served, and the offender is still considered dangerous, a prisoner can continue to receive up to five years additional containment, and this, in theory, could result in actual life imprisonment. However, the offender can be paroled or released at any time if it is determined that the offender is no longer a danger to society.

Someone who committed particularly sensational crimes, like Anders Behring Breivik, is likely to be confined in Norway’s recently opened (April 8th) Halden Prison .

Boasted to be the “most modern” prison in Europe, Halden has $1 million worth of art, private bathrooms and flatscreen televisions in every room, even unbarred windows offering a view, along with a gym, training room, chapel, library, family visiting unit, soccer field, its own school, and even a recording studio.

7-10 years of the good life in Resort Halden and a certain amount of dutiful expressions of repentance, regret, and conversion to liberal opinions and Anders Breivik could be a free man again. And he’d be only 39 to 42 years old.

In America even today, though we would dither about it for a few years, we would execute him. Before say 1965, for a killing spree on US soil, he would have been tried, sentenced, and executed by some means like hanging or electrocution within only a month or two of the date of the crime.

It seems impossible to avoid reflecting that Norway’s leftism-based inability to avenge its own victims, people murdered specifically as an expression of hostility to leftism, constitutes a bitterly ironical commentary on the same political and moral philosophy, and one, that I regret to note, works splendidly in supporting Breivik’s criticism .

Fast Company feature article.
Time Magazine Photogallery

Note from Dan: I’m generating credentials for David, but you can visit him at Never Yet Melted.

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