Mar 23 2006
A Lovely Resort for Rapists and Murderers
This Reuters piece is just too wrong for words.
BASTOY PRISON, Norway (Reuters) - The web site reads like an advertisement for a holiday home.”Is Bastoy the place for you?” it asks next to photographs of a sunset sparkling off the tranquil waters of the Oslo fjord and horses pulling sleighs over packed snow.
This wooded island could be — if you are a rapist, a murderer, a drug trafficker or have accepted a large bribe.
“We try to take a cross-section of the country’s prison population, not just the nice criminals,” said Oyvind Alnaes, governor of the minimum security prison on Bastoy Island about 46 miles south of the Norwegian capital.
Inmates have included Norway’s most notorious serial killer, Arnfinn Nesset, convicted of murdering 22 elderly people when he was manager of a nursing home in the 1970s. He was freed for good behavior after serving two-thirds of a 21-year sentence.
“A lot of people in Norway say that we treat them (the prisoners) too well because they should be punished. But this is the biggest mistake we have been making since the 1600s. Taking this line makes people bad,” Alnaes said.
“You have to believe people are born good.”
So punishing people for their crimes makes them bad? How did they get to prison in the first place if they weren’t, uh, bad? And, no, you don’t have to believe that people are born good. That’s the whole not-grasping-the-true-nature-of-man problem all over again.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
As a society we hardly every punish the rapists! Even in Canada, we rarely see anyone serve a full sentence in a rapes/sex assaults cases! We let them out to harm more children, women, and men!
November 1st, 2006 at 08:17 am
[...] Remember Bastoy Prison? al Reuters had a lovely piece on that progressive, peaceful, happy island prison in Norway. The Web site reads like an advertisement for a vacation home. [...]