It’s not very often the concept of restorative justice gets much play outside scholarly publications or reformist criminal justice circles, so first, some credit for Max Fisher at The Atlantic for giving it an earnest look
last week. In seeking to explain Norway’s seemingly measly
twenty-one-year sentence for remorseless, mass-murdering white
supremacist Anders Breivik—a sentence that is certain to be extended to
last the rest of his life—Fisher casts a critical eye on the underlying
philosophy that animates that country’s sentencing practices, finding it
to be “radically different” from what we’re used to in the United
States. When it comes to criminal sentencing, he notes, the United
States favors a retributive model—in which an offender must be duly
punished for his crimes—over a restorative model that “emphasizes
healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal
him or herself.”
“I don’t have an answer for which is better,” he says at the outset,
acknowledging that his own sense of outrage over Breivik’s sentence—like
that of many Americans—“hints at not just how different the two systems
are, but how deeply we may have come to internalize our understanding
of justice, which, whatever its merits, doesn’t seem to be as
universally applied as we might think.”
Read on...
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Showing posts with label Anders Breivik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anders Breivik. Show all posts
In Norway, a New Model for Justice
ON Friday a Norwegian court will hand down its verdict on Anders Behring
Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, detonated a bomb in central Oslo,
killing eight people and wounding hundreds more, then drove to Utoya
Island, where he shot and killed 69 participants in the Norwegian Labor
Party’s youth camp.
The world’s attention is focused on whether the court will find Mr.
Breivik guilty or criminally insane, and there has already been much
debate about how the court handled the question of his sanity. But there
is far more to it. Because it gave space to the story of each
individual victim, allowed their families to express their loss and
listened to the voices of the wounded, the Breivik trial provides a new
model for justice in cases of terrorism and civilian mass murder.
It is true that, on one level, the trial is not just about the state of
Mr. Breivik’s mind but forensic psychiatry itself. The trial featured two psychiatric reports,
the first concluding that at the time of the crime Mr. Breivik was
psychotic and delusional, the other that he was rational. The spectacle
of two teams of psychiatrists brandishing the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders and its Norwegian equivalent, only to draw
radically opposed conclusions, undermined many Norwegians’ faith in
forensic psychiatry.
This is a New York Times op-ed. Breivik was found sane and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Tom
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