Anders Breivik is a monster who deserves a slow and painful death. But Norwegian criminal justice is far too humane to grant this most inhumane of killers that kind of punitive treatment: Breivik, who murdered 77 people in a far-Right terrorist atrocity in 2011, resides in a three-room suite that includes a treadmill, a refrigerator, a television with a DVD player, a Sony PlayStation, and a desk with a type-writer.
Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.
Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.
As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.
I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.
As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.
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