From Fredrik Wandrup, Jens Bjørneboe: Mannen, Myten, Kunsten ©1984 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. Translated by Esther Greenleaf Mürer. Used by permission.
In the cell he didn't hold out, he was quickly transferred to the prison hospital in Åkerbergveien. From there he dated his letters "the Land of Fog and Mist" and drew pictures of himself in prison uniform. The Norwegian prison authorities would soon come to regret that they had ever allowed him behind the walls.
In the prison hospital Bjørneboe met several prisoners who had tried to commit suicide in order to escape from solitary or a punitive cell. Some had cut the artery on their ankles or wrists, others had eaten dangerous objects. The one who made the greatest impression was a man who had held a matchbox up to his eyes and lit all the matches at once, so that the burst of flame destroyed the whole eye.
To confront Jens Bjørneboe with such patients was like throwing sticks of dynamite on a flaming bonfire. The explosion which followed made the walls around the Norwegian prisons resemble the walls around Jericho. They shook and quaked under the wrathful writer's fanfares. Jens Bjørneboe would soon come to pay back the prison sentence to the courts with exorbitant interest.
As soon as the prison gates shut behind the writer again, he threw himself on his typewriter. He recorded all that he had heard and experienced. Incredible stories rose out of the pages like visions of horror and bestiality. . . .
Ironically enough Bjørneboe's series of prison articles began [in Dagbladet] on Christmas Eve 1959. "After all, Christmas comes but once a year," said Bjørneboe.
The articles are written with the elegant language and crystal-clear intelligence which mark the polemicist Jens Bjørneboe at his best. They lay great weight on the general emptiness of the times, which must bear its share of responsibility for the criminality of youth, for young people's restlessness and lack of ideals.
And this emptiness is something the attorney general and his generation have sown, the same people who are screaming for harsher punishments. It is the older generation who at the very outset stood godfather to criminality in the young. These were shocking thoughts at the time. The articles were written long before the day of prison reforms, in an atmosphere of loud calls for more "law and order."
Bjørneboe tells coldly and clearly and with great conviction what happens to the young lawbreakers in Norwegian prisons, among other things how frequently they try to take their own lives in the most imaginative and painful ways. They do this because they are simply psychologically unfit to be in prison.
The climax to these accusations against the prison system is "An open letter to the Minister of Justice" in which he accuses the authorities of murdering the prisoner Kjell Hansen. Four years previously this young boy had been put in a punitive cell. After that he was put in solitary confinement, where he immediately took his own life.
This happened despite the fact that three doctors had demonstrably declared him to be completely incapable of serving time: "All the specialists were agreed that incarceration of Kjell Hansen would lead to his taking his life or -- if this did not succeed -- to absolute madness."
This was strong stuff, a well-documented and incontestable individual case which shocked everyone who read about it. The example was followed by Bjørneboe's thorough and precise descriptions of medieval forms of disciplinary punishment in contemporary Norway. The descriptions made the county jail and the penitentiary in the year 1960 look like the Devil's darkest workshop.
These are the accusations, in order:
"The shutter." Here a prisoner can lie up to fourteen days running, chained hand and foot to wooden board in a room where a dim light bulb burns day and night.
"The tank." A cell bricked in in the cellar under the prison, with three or four square meters of floor surface, soundproofed and also lit day and night. For several months a prisoner can sit in this hole.
"The cage." An arrangement of horizontal and vertical steel bars inside an isolated cellar cell, a "tiger cage" where the prisoner may be placed naked, despite the fact that the space is cold and dank.
"The jacket." A tight straitjacket in which the prisoner is tied in until he has practically no freedom of movement. He can lie like that for months.
These particulars are the battering ram in Jens Bjørneboe's attack. He supplements them with his own interpretations of the tragic social background of the average Norwegian criminal, and moral and philosophical observations about our impoverished spiritual life. All the while he radiates strong tenderness and sympathy for those who are hit.
The prison articles will prove a high point in Bjørneboe's work as social gadfly. He had substantiation for what he wrote, the charges remained painfully uncontested. The material was as strong as dynamite. Here no caricatures were advanced, no speculations, no literary exaggerations. The pure truth was enough. This was the stinking reality, served on a platter to the public. A newly severed head couldn't have been more frightening.