Without conflict there is no theater; in all genres it revolves around this: that the spectator is witness to a fight. In all the forms of justice: farce, comedy, drama, tragedy—and in such varieties of jurisprudence as operetta, opera, and musical comedy, the central motif is the same: there is someone who triumphs and someone who must die. El momento de la verdad arrives in the court with the same beauty and precision as in the bullfight—when the condemned is to be killed. In the courtroom war is the father of everything.
           Every play is a hearing, a court case, and every court case is a war. The last phase is of necessity death.
          —Moment of Freedom (1966)

Take away the "immoral" criminal, and we'd be robbed of one of the lies we need in order to live: namely the belief that there is someone who is even more immoral than we are. We all need someone to despise and look down on as not having full value. This is another of our strong points of likeness with that same criminal: in prison there always develops a hierarchical type of society, where the safecracker and the gunman rank highest and the sexual offender lowest.
           The prison is a true copy of our own society.
          —"Crime as a way of life" (1967)

A judicial system's first task will always be to secure and protect itself: the judicial system must necessarily regard itself as justice and the rule of law incarnate, and it thus becomes entirely logical that defense of the judicial system must have the very highest priorityfollowed by protection of the state and its officials and civil servants. The inevitable consequence will be that the judicial system and its administration will comprise the very skeleton of society, its innermost, immutable, reactionary mineral core. The circle is complete: the prosecuting authority can only be reported to the prosecuting authority, whereupon the prosecuting authority "rejects" the accusations and declares the prosecuting authority free of any guilt.
          It cannot be otherwise.
          The righteous and the innocent (1967)

Our inherited criminal justice system quite simply regards the lawbreaker as "immor- al", just as in earlier times they also regarded, e.g. alcoholism or homosexuality or mental illness as sin, shame, and—in short, immoral. That means that from a judicial standpoint there are no problems with the administration of justice, but only purely professional and technical questions, such as interpretation of the law and the like. It is precisely this—that the whole management of the criminal law is in the hands of jurists who consider everything in fine order—which makes it all so horribly impossible to budge. To get anywhere you would have to remove the jurists from that part of the judicial system which has to do with human fates.
          —The righteous and the innocent (1967)

If I myself were to name one characteristic which is common to all the criminals I've met, it would have to be a very simplified catch phrase: lack of a sense for reality.
          One consequence of this will be an inability to follow the rules of the game in a very complex and anything but truly moral and just society, and furthermore a homelessness in the world which robs one of creativity, joy in one's work, and productivity. Where creativity is lacking, it is very easily replaced by destructivity, by the desire to destroy.
          —The righteous and the innocent (1967)

The lack of creativity can be translated into the lack of the ability to love, because all true creativity, all true joy in doing meaningful work as well as possible, really means the capacity for love. The true criminal is a person whose capacity for love—in the word's broadest meaning—has been killed or thoroughly damaged. In the habitual criminal we are dealing with an injured, a mutilated human being.
          —The righteous and the innocent (1967)

Small children are taught to memorize this verse:

Fight for all that you hold dear,
Till your dying breath.
Then you'll find you need not fear
Either life or death.

But when the schoolboy becomes a man, and takes the consequences of this teaching, they put him in prison. Provided of course that he holds his own judgment dear, his own opinion, and that his judgment is in conflict with that of the state and the public. It is expected of a good citizen that he should "hold dear" the same things the state holds dear, such as atomic bombs, planes and rockets—-and these he should fight for.
          —"Pornography in Norway from Viking times to the present" (1967)

Legal concepts revolve not around the law, not around The Eternal Law—but around the laws which were made by a random assembly of our grandfathers and fathers, by the society which has paid the judge to judge the way the arbitrary laws tell him to... [The accused's] chief enemy is not the prosecutor; his worst opponent is the "impartial" judge, who is paid precisely to be a party in the case, to be wholly and absolutely partisan in favor of the time-and-place- bound justice which may have been violated by the accused.
          —Do jurists have souls? (1966)

How does the victim, the robbed person, feel when he hears that the man who drank half a bottle of his export beer has been sentenced to two years in prison? Did he know what he was doing when he reported the loss? Probably not. And the man who reported the theft of the coat, did he know what he was doing? Probably not. But they will know it the next time they miss something, and then let us hope that as responsible human beings they won't report it to the police, because they no longer have confidence that the person arrested will receive humane treatment. That means that, if they are any kind of decent folk, they can no longer count on any protection against theft, because they won't be able to take it on their conscience to hand over a possible sinner to such a barbaric punishment.
           In other words: Law and justice no longer correspond. That is a situation which has arisen earlier, and it is the introductory phase to all reforms of criminal law. It is characteristic that it arises in layfolk long before it is felt by professional jurists or people who are tied to the court- and prison system.
          —Do jurists have souls? (1966)

Never in the history of the world have so many people been deprived of their freedom as in this century; notwithstanding that we know that humiliation and degradation don't serve our ideals of what a human being ought to be. Someone of Dostoevsky's dimensions, with his depth and his power, can grow and develop during a stay in prison, he can turn it to advantage. Normal people cannot. They are merely destroyed. They become sicker, deader, weaker, more afraid, more asocial and less morally responsible than before their incarceration.
          —"Mainly about prison sentences" (1960)

It went straight to my heart when I read Warden Halvorsen's words about one of the prisoners in the District Prison: "What's been missing in his life is a loving home, for he never had one, poor fellow."
          One senses from the tone that the inmate has finally found a loving home in the prison. I myself know a lot of prisoners who have had to do without a loving home—it's practically the norm among prisoners not to have a loving home—but I'm afraid that most of them don't understand that District Prison or the Penitentiary fully takes the place of what they missed in their childhood and youth. That's how ungrateful they are.
          —"Plank and Armchair" (1960)

You can't drum into a whole generation through film and print that the meaning of life is sex, cars and money—without its having its effects. And you can't solve the problems which have arisen, the problem of rootlessness, nihilism and lack of ideals, by calling the police. You can't solve anything whatsoever with the aid of longer and harsher prison sentences. Least of all can you cure spiritual poverty and desperation by such means.
          —The Treatment of Young Lawbreakers (1959)

We can hardly abolish the prisons completely, but I believe they can be reduced greatly. Without too much difficulty I think one could work out a "make it good again" system:
           The state pays the victim for injury. The state also gets the culprit a steady job—either inside the prison, or by setting up factories outside the walls. Instead of the insulting payment of 20 cents an hour a full wage is paid—preferably by agreement—so that the culprit pays back the State's outlay to the victim. Such a system would be able to give the guilty party a feeling of responsibility with respect to the damage he has inflicted.
          —Interview in Morgenbladet (1973)

Excerpts from a lecture by the retired executioner Lacroix, an inmate of the asylum in Powderhouse (1969)

           The many executed executioners—I'll mention Friedrich and Meister Hans, the robber and murderer Gratwell, Derrick, Brandon, Price, Rose, Marwell, Thrift, Dennis and Turlis—all were men who had seen and precisely observed the torments and agony of the death penalty at close quarters. No one knew the horror of an execution better than these men.
          There's a common theory, ladies and gentlemen, about "the death penalty's deterrent effect". Almost all defenders of capital punishment build on this thought: the deterrent effect, the so-called "general-preventative consideration".
          Who of all people should be more exposed to this general-preventative effect than these very colleagues of mine who have been the nearest witnesses of mutilations and the dread of death? Who should be more "deterred" by the example than precisely the executioner? Who should fear the scaffold and the gibbet more than the public executioner himself?
          And what deterrent effect has it had to be the performer of maybe two to three thousand executions?
          None, ladies and gentlemen, none!
          The executed executioners' amputated corpses are the best historical and psychological disproof of the punishment's general-preventative effect. When you've seen such things, or just know this—then your brain must have been ruined either by legal or theological studies if you're still enough of an imbecile to believe in the general-preventative effect.
          The true effect is the opposite: the more brutal the punishment, the more brutal the crimes.
           Powderhouse (1969)

          Nothing, ladies and gentlemen, nothing is easier for someone with skill and a knowledge of anatomy than to kill a man—even at my own advanced age—without instruments, with just one chop of the hand, painlessly and instantaneously. But that isn't permitted anywhere; everything must happen ritually. All executions are ritual executions. Everything must take place according to a formula established by the state—and it must be humane, effective, fast, and so forth—and the delinquent must be fully conscious, and in the best possible state of health besides—even with his teeth filled. Of course there's no such thing as a humane official execution. . . . The forms which are used today are all intended as punishment, and even if we no longer quarter and burn our public enemies, we still see to it that the torture takes place mentally—through formalism, bureaucracy and long waiting periods.
           Powderhouse (1969)

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