Of the many grim details emerging from the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, an unexpected twist appeared in Norway's Verdens Gang newspaper. The director of the Ila prison, where Breivik may spend the rest of his days, described how the mass murderer could be supplied with "professional friends". They would play indoor hockey with him, or chess.

The Norwegian prison service is faced with a conundrum. On on the one hand, Breivik cannot be trusted with other prisoners because of security fears; on the other, it is not prepared to leave him languishing in isolation. Specially trained companions may be the solution.

This will seem offensively shocking or unsettlingly admirable, depending upon your view of state punishment and incarceration. But consider, for the sake of argument, that it is a dramatic example of brave prison idealism. By trying to make Breivik's life behind bars liveable, as opposed to locking the door and throwing away the key, it is not giving up on the possibility that he may reform.

The opposite stance prevails in countries that have the death penalty for murder. Take the United States, where state execution is remarkably persistent for all its enlightenment values. In an essay for the London Review of Books, Thomas Lacquer concluded that the American death penalty had little to do with punishment or justice. It simply failed to deliver on either count. Instead, he argued that a "primordial sacrificial logic" was at play. Like a scapegoat designated to carry away the sins of the many, killing those who commit atrocities reassures the community that the moral order is not fundamentally flawed. Capital punishment is a rite of purification.

Similarly, some may feel that Breivik has committed acts so heinous that his continuing existence – and certainly happy existence – offends the moral order. Sacrifice may seem the only option, the opposite of supplying prison friends.

But think of it this way. Implicit in Breivik's perverse ideology is a quest for an imagined purity, of a racist kind. By punishing but not scapegoating, and in fact caring for Breivik, Norway is setting itself above his purity games. The state will not follow the sacrificial logic.

There is a second related conundrum embedded in the story, too. It might be put like this. Are there not cases, particularly terrible crimes, when justice itself is not enough? Something more is required if the horror is to be redeemed.

This struck me when reading about the work of Nic Dunlop. He tracked down Comrade Duch, the head of the Khmer Rouge's secret police, a man responsible for the murder of more than 20,000 people. However, at the end of his journey, following a grisly trail of torture and death, what Dunlop found took him by surprise. It was not so much justice, as understanding.

Duch turned out to be a pathetic figure, apparently contrite a few decades on. "As long as he remains a human being," Dunlop concludes, "and that's what I found, there is hope."

It is as if a different imperative comes through when no practical justice can do justice to the horror that has happened. It needs to be viewed from a place beyond good and evil. The events must be known, but without destroying hope. Only then can human beings who have suffered much have the chance of living well. It is a kind of forgiveness, which might be defined as the capacity to have a future in spite of the past.

It is surely too soon for that for Breivik's victims. But perhaps deep in the Norwegian prison system's collective unconscious lies the hope that, one day, it may not be. Compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victims helps hold on to that brave possibility.