By Peter O'Neil, Postmedia News Europe Bureau
Anders Behring Breivik, who according to his lawyer has admitted his role in the mass murder of at least 93 people in an “atrocious … but necessary” act, could if found guilty be imprisoned beyond the country’s 21-year maximum sentence, according to a Norwegian prosecutor.
But to keep him in jail for the rest of his life, in the country’s famously comfortable prison system, would be unheard of in the peaceful, egalitarian country of five million people, said Carol Sandbye, a lawyer who works in Norway’s office of public prosecutions.
She said the country’s General Civil Penal Code gives the state prosecutor the right to seek an extension of sentences beyond the 21-year maximum for up to five years at a time, on the condition that the inmate is deemed to be a “high risk” of repeating serious offences.
Sandbye, who was fielding media calls at the Oslo Police District office Sunday, said it’s therefore technically possible to keep extending a sentence indefinitely.
“You can, but it’s highly unlikely,” she told Postmedia News in a telephone interview. “That would mean that person is going to spend his entire life in jail.”
Sandbye said that inmates in all “civilized countries” without the death penalty are eventually paroled. But in Canada it is widely assumed notorious serial killers Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo will die in prison.
Sandbye acknowledged that the devastating mass murder Friday could prompt a debate about whether some people should always remain behind bars.
“That’s what the world needs to understand about Norway, is that this incident represents our loss of innocence, because we’ve been a very safe country to live in until now,” she said.
“There’s been no reason to keep people in prison for life.”
Breivik said through his lawyer Sunday that he wants to explain his actions in his first court appearance Monday.
That has prompted speculation that he hopes to promote his far-right theories outlined in a lengthy online essay and video circulating on social media this weekend about a “necessary” violent crusade against “cultural Marxism” and the “Islamization of Europe.”
“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” lawyer Geir Lippestad told a Norwegian TV station, adding that Breivik admitted to the bombing in Oslo and mass shootings of young Norwegians on a nearby island resort.
If convicted, Breivik would serve time in a penal system that has been both praised and ridiculed for its comforts and conveniences.
In May Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid ran a story showing a murderer sunbathing outside his chalet located at the Bastoy Prison on an island south of Oslo.
“Can a prison possibly justify treating its inmates with saunas, sunbeds and deck chairs if that prison has the lowest reoffending rate in Europe?” the Daily Mail asked, noting that Norway’s penal system “runs contrary to all our instincts — but achieves everything we could wish for.”
John Pratt, a criminologist at Victoria University in New Zealand, explained in a 2007 essay the genesis of low imprisonment rates and humane prison conditions in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
He said Scandinavia’s “exceptionalism” is rooted in the region’s remote location and barren geography, which meant that there was little incentive for the creation of a powerful landowning conservative upper class ruling over a feudal society. Instead, economic life was based around owners of small plots of land, leading to far greater egalitarianism.
The idea of capital punishment lost favour in the 1800s, whereas in far more hierarchical societies such as Britain and France “the death penalty was used as a public spectacle which demonstrated the ultimate power of the ruling classes to literally annihilate those who constituted a threat to them.”
Egalitarian principles combined with the emergence of the welfare state in the 20th century to encourage a far more lenient approach to punitive justice, he wrote, adding that there is little media sensationalism in the three countries about victims’ rights and so-called “cushy” prison conditions.
Pratt, asked via email Sunday if he believed Friday’s events could lead to a hardening of public attitudes towards criminal justice matters, replied: “I think it will obviously be challenged, but at the same time I would be very surprised if there were any major changes. All the speeches from (government leaders) yesterday were about reaffirming Norwegian values, not looking for vengeance and retribution.”
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