



As a moderately serious gamer, I have to admit I can relate to this a little. Actually, anyone who, say, uses a newer computer at home than the one available in the workplace might feel a pang of sympathy while the spinning wheel of death (or its OS equivalent) grinds pointlessly away while you’re trying to update a spreadsheet.



Anders Behring Breivik is sort of the Timothy McVeigh of Norway. In July 2011, in accordance with his right-extremist worldview, he detonated a bomb in a government building in Oslo, which killed eight people, and then went on a shooting spree on the island of Utøya, killing a further 69 people, most of them teenagers. In some ways his profile overlaps more with the Unabomber—Breivik is well-educated and distributed a lengthy manifesto justifying his actions—but that combination fails to capture the Hannibal Lecter-esque self-control and sangfroid that Breivik apparently exhibited. In August 2012 he was sentenced to “containment,” a form of punishment in Norway that can be extended if the authorities deem it necessary, with a “time frame” of 21 years in prison—the maximum sentence.

Apparently Breivik isn’t enjoying his containment very much. On Friday the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) received a letter from Breivik in which he announced his intention to go on a hunger strike until conditions in the prison improve. He claims that he is being treated “worse than an animal” in prison and demands that the “torture” he is undergoing come to an end.

It’s not clear that most people would agree with Breivik’s use of the word torture here, although he may have a point about the unjust treatment. According to Pierre-Henry Deshayes of AFP,



The demands include better conditions for his daily walk and the right to communicate more freely with the outside world, which he argues are in line with European rights legislation. He also demanded the replacement of a PlayStation 2 games console for a more recent PS3 “with access to more adult games that I get to choose myself” as well as a sofa or armchair instead of a “painful” chair. “Other inmates have access to adult games while I only have the right to play less interesting kids games. One example is “Rayman Revolution”, a game aimed at three year olds,” wrote the 35-year-old convicted killer. Held apart from other prisoners since 2011 for security reasons, Breivik wrote that he has behaved in an “exemplary fashion” in prison, arguing that he has the right to a wider “selection of activities” than other inmates to compensate for his strict isolation. Breivik also wants his standard weekly allowance of 300 kroner ($49, 36 euros) to be doubled, particularly to cover his postal charges for written correspondence. His mail is monitored and censored by prison authorities which, he complained, considerably restricts and slows down his contact with the outside world.



The concept of being permitted to use an inferior gaming system to more recent models on the market being likened to, say, waterboarding is completely silly, a product of the high-flown rhetoric common to political terrorists like Breivik. And yet his case prompts interesting questions about prisoners’ rights in the digital age. In the United States, many prisoners suffer in severely inhumane conditions, including widespread overuse of solitary confinement. Breivik’s complaint about his PS2 system suggests an obvious analogy with reading materials—should particularly heinous criminals be denied access to the same copy of To Kill a Mockingbird other inmates enjoy? It’s not really clear.







The enormity of Breivik’s crimes aren’t relevant to the purpose it serves to deny him petty privileges. Keeping him off the street is a non-issue, and Breivik is experiencing the very deprivations that make prison stints such a powerful disincentive, disincentives of which Breivik was presumably already aware when he committed his crimes. Of course, that logic can go only so far: nobody would suggest that the availability of merely double-ply toilet paper when triple-ply versions are also being manufactured would constitute anything for prisoners’ rights activists to get upset about. There’s a line in there somewhere, and the PS2 probably isn’t very near that line.





via Slate



Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Muslim-hating wingnut Pamela Geller justifies mass murder in Norway

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Muslim-hating wingnut Pamela Geller justifies mass murder in Norway

