11 Quotes by Nils Christie

Maybe law is closer related to art than most of us are aware of. But art and power do often stand in a strained relationship.

The most dangerous place for your life is in your home, as you probably know. Most people are killed by family or those they are relatively close to. Refuges for women are important to deal with this. But in the end there are certain risks you take – when you walk in the streets you might be hit by a car.

The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.

We know, all of us, that there is more to our lives than markets and calculation. We have friends for friendship, fall in love for no rational reasons, behave as beasts or heroes even when we know it will not profit us.

The liberal state was not all that liberal when it came to the establishment of the external conditions for the free flow of economic entrepreneurship. Roads, railroads and regulating the poor became essential.

If pain is too bad to be executed by everybody, and seen by everybody, is it not because it is too bad?

We have distant democracy, well suited to a distant penocracy, well suited to serve a large-scale society using taximeters to control the price of all acts.

Look for alternatives to punishments, not only alternative punishments.

In the 1960's, Labour had gained some power, or at least respectability. Spokesmen for the working class - but of course not necessarily coming from that class or belonging there except through ideology - were upset by the exposed inequalities and abuses disguised as treatment. It did not exactly strengthen the credibility of these measures that most receivers of this type of treatment for crime turned out to belong to just those classes supposed to be in political power.