Anders Breivik, self-confessed Nazi mass-murderer, has won a court case against the ever-correct state of Norway. The food and living conditions are not up to snuff, as it were.
Not that the monster is likely to be treated very much differently in future. Perhaps an M & S ready meal now and then, but certainly no ‘association’ with other inmates.
So was it worth the legal costs – not a krone paid by him, I’m sure? Even the purists must wonder.
Boadicea's Chariot 
I read that too, Janus. I also noted the other day that the UK (and probably other such countries) were forbidden (by the EU) to return criminals to other EU countries whose jail conditions weren’t to the same standard as those in their own country. I fail to understand why those incarcerated should live in better conditions than many of the tax-payers who are paying for their keep.
I guess prison reform is a tricky thing. I met a chap here recently who spent 10 years in several of Zimbabwe’s prisons. He described in eloquent detail the exceedingly harsh conditions therein. People lying together like sardines, and I mean that literally. A sleeping place 30cm wide. Everbody has to turn at once. All 70 of them. But you can imagine the degradations and suffering of such an institution in a country like this. Interestingly perhaps, he said that as a white, he was treated better than his fellow black inmates.
The point being I suppose, is that there are extremes to prison life and imprisonment can serve more than one purpose. In the case of Breivik, I believe the main one is to exclude him from society, to prevent him from repeating his crimes. Punishment, another goal of gaol, is, in this case, almost neither here nor there. It would serve little purpose other than to satisfy those who seek vengeance. And vengeance for vengeance’s sake, I would argue, is a characteristic of an uncivilized mind.
Breivik’s prison is a palace compared with that, Sipu. He enjoys the internet and Playstation, deprived in fact of almost nowt except human contact. I think his treatment is too extreme!
…….and another thing! Don’t mass-murderers forfeit certain human rights when they are convicted? especially when they continue to insult every standard of social behaviour with their own antisocial ideas? (No, they are not a matter of opinion!)
Mornin’ all. And I contend that vengeance for vengeance’s sake is not always the characteristic of an uncivilised mind. I refer M’Learned Friend Sipu to the diary of Air Commodore D’Arcy Greig, DFC, AFC, which I happen to be reading at the moment, describing his time flying wood and canvas biplanes over Mesopotamia in the early 1920s. An RAF aircraft had been brought down by rifle fire. The observer was shot by Marsh Arabs trying to escape and the pilot was dismembered alive in a local village called Khidr. I quote from page 42,
“However, it was not long before nemesis overtook Khidr, which, in biblical language, ‘was put to the sword’. A Ghurka regiment made a very thorough job of killing every living being in the village and burning the place to the ground. In the latter part of the insurrection this treatment was meted out to a number of places in this locality, a line of action which produced results and earned the respect of the inhabitants of the area. The primitive or semi-civilised foe has nothing but contempt for kindly treatment – the fellow who wields the mailed fist with the utmost ruthlessness is the chap to be looked up to.”
Whilst the language and sentiments of that age will outrage most liberalists today, one wonders how much things have really changed. In that part of the world, terrorists still murder captured pilots and countless opponents alike in the most barbaric fashion, whereas the Israelis, who know a thing or two about surviving in the Middle East, raze the family homes of suicide bombers and the Americans, who don’t, ‘take out’ known Daesh protagonists with drone attacks.
An eye for an eye, perhaps?
OZ