The undersigned can celebrate a kind of sabbatical anniversary for his own prison debate just when Arne Skouen has managed to make a serious crack in the unassailable public system whose task is to deal with people who for various reasons don't readily fit into our ever more well-oiled social machinery.   Arne Skouen's method is the only correct one, the only usable one.   After battling for years to call attention to irregularities by means of soft, polite discourse, by explaining the situation carefully and patiently without calling forth any real reaction from the authorities, it turned out that one term, placed carefully and with forethought—“concentration camp”—produced the miracle: the departmental officials turned in their armchairs.   They felt wounded, they're muttering about libel suits against the disturbers of the peace.   That is a miracle.

So far the great Bøyg always wins without a fight.

And the departments win without answering.

But I must confess that I won't believe in a libel suit until I've seen it Shouldn't the old methods prevail today too? —If they should suddenly give way this time, if the cracks in the walls around the public institutions should get bigger and bigger, lead to a draft, possibly to an airing out—then this will be due solely to the uncanny perseverance Arne Skouen has shown, to such a degree that it may be dawning on the bureaucrats that we won't get rid of him by friendly means.   Besides, Skouen represents a case which is so unambiguous and so shocking that there cannot be divided opinions about it; only completely apathetic people can be indifferent to the problems with our special schools' treatment of the handicapped.   The staff's illegal censorship of the pupils' mail in itself gives full backing for Skouen's anything but frivolous use of the ugly phrase “concentration camp.  ” Naturally he could have used the words “prison,” “preventive detention” or “prison camp” instead.

The censored mail is a fact we cannot take seriously enough, and as far as I know mail censorship is legal only in prisons, preventive detention centers, and concentration camps.   So he could have said “prison”—but I think that Arne Skouen chose just the right expression, and I believe that the term “concentration camp” is very carefully weighed.   Its effect suggests this.

What, then is the reaction of those responsible?

Beyond the wounded expressions, the aggrieved faces, the affronted attitudes, a lot of things are suddenly going on behind the scenes: they're calling meetings, they're telephoning, they're searching through old records to find letters which can discredit the witnesses who confirm the charges.   The injured and insulted party isn't quite so defenseless and quite so passive as he gives the impression of being.   Here they are acting.   A defense is being built up, quickly, proficiently and effectively.   But first comes the great public declaration from our bureaucratic wage earners:

IT'S ALL A PACK OF LIES; THERE ISN'T A TRUE WORD IN THE ALLEGATIONS!

As always, we meet the same know-nothing and innocent public-servant face, and the same warm-hearted and convincing answer:

A) We've never done anything wrong.  
B) We never do anything wrong.  
C) We never will do anything wrong.

We know this reaction from prison debates, from the Bjerketun case—and now we meet it again in the Skouen case: the righteous men “reject the allegations”.   They are quite simply rejected! And of course we must trust the officials, or else they would naturally not be sitting in their chairs as guardians of society.  Those whom God has given an office, He has also given ... Yes, what has he given them? He has given them an almost watertight system of self-protection, a system of camaraderie and collegial loyalty which is almost impossible to break.   One of the secrets of the system is, among others, that nobody is completely responsible for what happens.

From the television debate around the special schools we can take a fresh and rose-fragrant example: in one of the speeches from the “board of arbitration,” or whatever it's called these days, it was said: The staff are not responsible, their working conditions are too difficult.   The leadership isn't responsible, they have too little money.   The Department is not responsible, for either nothing wrong is going on in the “camps”—oops, the schools,—or if so the Department doesn't know anything about it.   The government has no responsibility for anything, it has too much to think about.   Parliament isn't responsible either, for it, after all, is “the people,” that is, the voters and the taxpayers who have chosen these particular representatives to Parliament.   In short: it is the taxpayers themselves who are responsible for the misery which besides—seen from the Department's level—doesn't exist anyway.   But if there is in fact anything wrong, then it is “the people's” fault.

To the people and to the taxpayers belong, among others, Arne Skouen, and if, against all expectations, some corpses should be found somewhere on board the ship, then Skouen is to blame for it himself.   He should have protested against it.   Now he has protested, but that was wrong too.   The corpses he found on board weren't real corpses, they were just some people the skier-and-sandwich society didn't need, some children who didn't seem to be of much use.   They were hardly worth the bother to censor their mail.   Besides, Skouen has protested in an offensive manner.   He should have protested or criticized in a manner which was so inoffensive that nobody heard the criticism, so that they could have filed it away without feeling disturbed by it.

So: it's all Skouen's fault.

The authorities have, now as always, clean hands and a good conscience.   The departmental reaction has time after time been the same: If young prisoners hang themselves in prison, then nobody within the prosecuting authority, the prison system or the courts can be blamed for this.   When it is shown that young girls—for example at Bjerketun—have been shut up in solitary confinement for weeks, nobody can be blamed for this.   When it is shown that violation after violation has taken place at reform schools and orphanages, nobody can be blamed for this.   When it transpires that children in special schools have been shut up in solitary confinement—in pyjamas in cold cellars or rooms with open windows—that they have been struck and physically maltreated, when it comes out clearly that their contact with the outside world is subjected to mail censorship—then, logically enough, nobody can be blamed for this either.

The holy men are always right.

The punitive cells at Bastøy I've seen myself: two or three square meters in area, and with such a low sloping ceiling that the boys could hardly stand up in them.   But the cells were merely decorative, that is, they didn't really exist.   They were an optical illusion.

A clear and bloody line runs through all this.   From orphanages and special schools there is a direct connection to the reform school, the borstal, the prison and the preventive detention center.

I think one should bear in mind that these are old things, it's all old practice.   Those who protect the system today have themselves invested too much of their lives in this system.   To admit that it is an unworkable, destructive and pathogenic system would, for those too deeply implicated, be psychologically almost impossible; it would mean admitting that they had acted wrongly, uselessly and harmfully for decades.   From a purely psychological standpoint one can understand this without difficulty; they can't bring themselves to admit that the criticism is justified, because they themselves have served the apparatus the criticism is directed at.   So instead they defend themselves and the apparatus by all possible means, first and foremost by protecting each other, by explaining away, raising smoke screens, invoking authority and exerting power.

The way in which this power comes to be applied is of great interest, for it is the Bøyg's use of power: don't answer, don't act, don't speak—that is, at most limit yourself to “rejecting the criticism” as unjustified.   (How often haven't we read this in the daily press: “The department [authorities, leadership, board, etc.   etc.  ] rejects the criticism.  ”) That doesn't do it all, but it does much, very much.   The case must be advanced anew, the attack must be renewed, the basis for the criticism must be stated anew, so that in the next round it can be “rejected” anew.   So there is a new round, new rejections, new delays, new postponements, a new tug of war, new denials—as long as the attack or the criticism lasts.

The Bøyg's method is a war of sheer endurance and attrition.   And in almost all cases a fight between departmental authorities and a single person will end with economic and physical exhaustion of the individual.   The situation is very simple: what makes the Bøyg's method so ingenious and watertight is the fact that the public men have all the advantages on their side: they have all the resources at their disposal, they have free legal and professional assistance, they have the sympathy of the courts and all the departments within the bureaucracy on their side, they can mobilize the whole system to their own advantage, in a world of camaraderie and in-group loyalty.   In addition they have both time and the national treasury on their side: they can defend themselves during office hours, and they can use public means, the taxpayers' money, for their own defense.   They don't even need to think about making a living while the battle is in progress: we pay them to sit in their seats and quite simply just to be there, they are paid to exist, while they telephone, organize and arrange the war of attrition.   This is, was, and always has been the bureaucrats' true bulwark.

This method—the Bøyg's—is so taken for granted by the whole system that indeed the individual figures in the machinery find nothing improper or dubious in it: Of course it couldn't be otherwise.   The whole defense is built on “documents”, meetings, postponements, “documents,” conferences, delays, investigations, committees, postponements etc.   to all eternity.

Only an unheard-of intensification of the critique, only insults and an unyielding perseverance can force the walls to crack.

How shall we properly define the term “concentration camp”? As: “An area where people are collected, with or without their consent, with or without a criminal record, because of ‘asocial’ traits, because of ‘deviation’ from what the society in question calls ‘normal’, because of inability to work or because of certain sicknesses or because of deviant political opinions—a place one cannot leave on one's own initiative, where one is subject to the disciplinary punishments of those in power, where one's incoming and outgoing mail is censored, but where one still has somewhat greater freedom of movement than in a prison.  ”

Should there really be a libel suit against Arne Skouen, the authorities will doubtless conduct it with the aid of an almost dyslexic literal interpretation.   Still, Skouen should have the opportunity to defend his choice of words.   Besides, it doesn't matter if he loses; there are other words left in the language, and he can use one slander after another.   There's something about Skouen's tone which indicates that they won't shut his mouth by theatrical trials.

Arne Skouen's case has a scope far beyond the particular sore point he has put his finger on—the special schools.   Orphanages, reform schools, juvenile correction centers, etc.  , etc.  —to no small degree they all embrace the same clientele: the end of the line is the prison and the preventive detention center.   An uncomfortably high number of residents of prisons and detention centers have had such “homes” as stations along the way, and the totality not only represents a vast social and human problem, but says something about the whole state of health or sickness in the society we've taken over.

In my work, which has always been somewhat documentary, I have occupied myself in turn with the German concentration camps, with the “doctors' trials” (prosecutions of a number of German doctors who had performed experiments on the prisoners with crippling or lethal results); with the school system, where the case of “Jonas” signified my first meeting with the special-school problem; with the quisling trials, which were my first encounter with the judicial system, with the prison system in The Bad Shepherd and its reworking, Many Happy Returns!—and more recently with war crimes in general, and how they've become a matter of course in modern warfare.

Of all these gloomy subjects it is still the meeting with the Norwegian prison system which has seemed the most hopeless, the most immutable and the most personally depressing.

The reason lies in two main points:

A) Our complete lack of professional, i.  e.   medical, psychotherapeutic and diagnostic insight into the “criminal's” essence, into the reasons for his incorrigible, chronic “criminal nature.  ”

B) The prisoner's utter helplessness and lack of rights vis-à-vis the judicial- and prison system's enormous resources for self-defense.

I shall first go a little more closely into point A.   To occupy oneself with the history of the prison system and penal reform is one of the most depressing things a person can do, not only because of all the inhumanity and bestiality you necessarily stumble on in the form of society's attempts to defend itself against the individuals who by word or deed offend that same society's values—but far more because of the total hopelessness and uselessness in which it all ends up.   In fact it doesn't matter how you treat the habitual offender, the constitutional criminal.   The result is and will remain practically zero.   Severity doesn't help, and “help” doesn't help.   Everything you do is groping in the dark, everything you say is guesswork, everything you think is arbitrary.   You're like a doctor who has to treat a sickness he knows nothing whatever about.   This is the same situation.   Our inherited criminal justice system quite simply regards the lawbreaker as “immoral”, 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.

In the last century Lombroso wrote his L'uomo Delinquente (“The Criminal”), in which he promulgated the theory that the true criminal was an atavistic phenomenon, an inherited, inexplicable throwback to a half-human state, to a kind of moral missing link, a human predator without ties to law, order and society.   Lombroso's conclusion was that, since all treatment or punishment was useless, habitual criminals would merely be a lifelong plague and a torment to themselves and others, and the most humane thing was simply to kill them—not just murderers and men of violence, but criminals in general.   His theory was gratefully adopted by all the reactionary governments we have seen since, above all by Mussolini's and Hitler's “regimes.”

Almost immediately the aristocratic Lombroso received a reply from revolutionary France, where Tarde maintained the direct opposite: there was no #147;uomo delinquente”, no constitutional criminal, and the lawbreaker is only a sick fruit of a sick society: overturn our poisoned, lying and corrupt society, put the human being instead of money at the center, and you'll get a society in which there are no criminals.   Tarde's theory was accepted by the socialist societies as a natural part of socialism.

Now in the course of time it has turned out that we need not view the problem quite so pessimistically as Lombroso—but at the same time it has also become clear that Tarde's optimism doesn't hold up either.   It is natural to believe that something can be done, but we just don't know what.

We don't know what should be done, because we don't understand the condition we want to cure.   The recidivist and the habitual criminal, the eternal, chronic, incurable criminal is an unexamined area both for psychology and psychiatry—and he will remain unexamined so long as we have sitting authorities who believe that crime is due to what we call by the beloved and meaningless word “immorality.”

We need millions and millions for a true investigation of criminality and of the criminal, we must labor long and hard, before we can hope to find a rational approach.   Everyone who knows anything about it will be aware that lawbreakers are neither more remarkable nor more boring, neither dummer nor smarter, neither better nor worse, than most people.   The criminals are just, in various ways, different—and, be it noted, different in each his own way! 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.

I don't believe that this is by any means an adequate formulation, but I think that the problem lies in this direction.   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 sense—has been killed or thoroughly damaged.   In the habitual criminal we are dealing with an injured, a mutilated human being.

In short: we have before us a sick being, marked by sufferings ranging from strong neuroses over pure psychopathologies to fully developed psychoses.   When and how the picture of sickness was caused must be the task of psychologists and psychiatrists to clarify.   As with all scientific research, it can only proceed out of a desire to know and not from hand-me-down prejudices, emotions or moral preconceptions.

At one time it was forbidden both by the Church and by the temporal authorities to dissect corpses, there was a death penalty for violating the dead.   It was a law which had to be broken, and the first great anatomists stole corpses at night from the places of execution and dissected them in secret.

Today we know just as little about the criminal as the Middle Ages knew about anatomy.  The task lies before us.

As for the origin of criminality, we shall just quickly point to the trail which leads back through the criminals' youth and childhood; back to: reform schools, special schools, orphanages, borstals, broken and destroyed parental homes, to inflicted injuries and inborn weaknesses, to sickness and lack of education, to loneliness and abuse, unjust treatment, to lack of love, warmth and caring.   Layer upon layer the injuries have accumulated, until they give us a well-known picture: the incurable, “constitutional” criminal.

The sight of this condition, juxtaposed with the sight of society's reaction to the problem, is truly depressing in its hopelessness, not least because of all the “moral men” who protest against every objective reflection, the Mrs. Grundys in the judicial system, in the letters columns and the lead articles in certain newspapers, in the departments and in the corridors: all the people who have got used to a system they thrive in, and who view all changes, always and everywhere, as nihilism, anarchy, softness on crime and the end of the world.   They are still in the majority.   The inevitable conclusion must be that so long as we don't know what chronic criminality is, everything we do will either make the misery worse, or in the very best cases merely have no effect.   To punish makes evil worse, and to preach morals is as useless as singing hymns for a cancer patient.

No reforms help; only a complete revolution of the whole criminal justice system will mean anything: we must rethink it from the bottom up and to the final consequence.   Otherwise everything is futile.

Such an upheaval in ways of thought and practice will meet the very toughest resistance in precisely the people who today manage the judicial bureaucracy and earn their livings there—and these are the same people who have the greatest influence on what will happen—because they are “professionals”, because they are “authorities.”

A more disheartening prospect is impossible to imagine.

All the same there is one which is worse.

It is—against the above background—the sight of what possibilities the system itself has for protecting and defending itself, what an almighty hand the prosecuting authority has for defending the prosecuting authority.   To begin with, a complaint against or a criticism of the prosecuting authority can only be referred to the prosecuting authority itself.   The next step consists in the prosecuting authority finding the prosecuting authority free of any blame.   It has never made a mistake, it does not make mistakes, it never will make a mistake.

The circle is closed, the wall is secure.

During my own conflict with the prosecuting authority regarding the prison debate of a few years ago, I got to experience the system's methods of self-preservation so glaringly that at first I didn't believe my own eyes and ears.   The mechanism functioned with a nightmarish simplicity, as intangible and as precise as a Kafka novel, as absurd as something out of Beckett.

As some will still remember, it concerned a young inmate, Kjell Hansen, who took his own life in prison—after the doctors involved in the case (medical director Dr. Leikvam, police doctor Irmelin Kristensen and medical director Brodwall, at that time doctor at Ila Detention Center) had declared him absolutely unfit to serve his term, to such a degree that any incarceration must be regarded as life-threatening.   After the doctors' findings had been respected for a time, he was arbitrarily imprisoned, whereupon the doctors' prognosis was realized almost immediately: he hanged himself in his cell.   It was an open-and-shut case; on the prosecuting authority's part there was a clear disregard of the expert doctors' testimony, with an open breach of the penal code's provision concerning “the prisoner's unfitness to serve time”, a infraction which had death as its consequence.

For various reasons I believed—and still believe—that the chief of criminal investigation, Lars L'Abbé-Lund, was the one responsible for breaking the law.

When nothing else helped, or had any effect whatsoever, I used the same method which Arne Skouen is using today: to gather up the coarsest insults in the language to provoke a reaction.   I don't know how many times I've repeated in writing and in speech that the criminal chief had made himself guilty of negligent homicide; the last time was during a press conference in Göteborg and in an interview with the weekly Aktuell.   There was never talk of any libel suit.

Instead Attorney General Aulie took the matter under advisement and concluded that for once there was no negligence on the criminal chief's part.   Instead Attorney General Aulie advanced the unheard-of claim that if anyone could be blamed, it would have to be the prison's medical director—the very man who had done more than any other person to save the life of Kjell Hansen!—The prosecuting authority again found the prosecuting authority completely snow-white and free of guilt.

More or less in tandem with this another main point was dealt with: my assertions concerning the police's maltreatment of people arrested, something which is familiar from the police departments of all countries, and which the famed criminologist and investigator Harry ????? (well-known during the war in Norway under the name “Revolver-Harry”) openly admits to in his in every way brilliant autobiography.   Neither in this case, which was called forth by the novel The Bad Shepherd, was the undersigned in any way called to account for statements and claims—a libel suit would in both cases have meant that I myself could have insisted on interrogating the witnesses who appeared.   Instead a judicial hearing was arranged, and the choice of method and technique was lodged safely in the hands of District Attorney Dorenfeldt.   The district attorney's first action was to remove the three most qualified and weightiest witnesses from the witness list: medical director Leikvam, police doctor Irmelin Kristensen and medical director Brodwall.   The district attorney kept the witnesses he himself wanted—people with lower incomes and assorted ex-convicts.   Every single case was carefully considered by itself, and what happened in the courtroom was simply that a witness repeated his complaints that he had been beaten, kicked or whatever, either in the police car or at the station.   After the witness's testimony came two new witnesses, policemen who said they remembered the case, and that the witness had hit his face against the wall or had attacked a large number of policemen, who in self-defense had regrettably had to hold the desperate fighter fast.  How many remember today the tiresome story of the professor in Trondheim who was arrested because of diabetes, was handcuffed and struck in the face by the police because he asked for chocolate to counteract insulin shock? If two schoolboys hadn't happened to observe the whole episode through an open window, the case in Trondheim would have followed the same course: the drunken and violent professor had struck himself in the face.) District Attorney Dorenfeldt maneuvered the case so simply and high-handedly that one was left sitting back in speechless admiration.   There was not a wrinkle left on any police uniform.

For the uninitiated the whole hearing was just one monotonous bore, a chain of repetitions.   For those who were clear about what was really happening, it was a purely absurd, formalistic stage play.   The last thing I remember from it all was that as I was leaving, an elderly court official came over to me unbidden and declared, utterly shaken, that he had never witnessed the like in a courtroom.   (I'm eternally grateful to him: he gave me the idea for the Servant of Justice in Moment of Freedom.)

Since then I've come to see the necessity in the whole method; 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 priority—followed 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.

Now Arne Skouen has achieved what Helge Krog and I failed to achieve: a libel suit.

I congratulate him.   Krog would have sent flowers.

We must await the case and see what the authorities will resort to: they'll probably claim that the concept “concentration camp” should have something to do with German fascism, or some such literal interpretation.   However, that isn't true; the word is older than Hitler.   But in any case, whatever the authority and the bureaucracy thinks up, I'd be putting it mildly to say that I will follow it with skepticism.   I will look on it with boundless suspicion and mistrust.

As we all know, the Bøyg chose the safest way; there was no suit.

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This page last revised July 1999