Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [150]
“You’re kidding?”
“The public require us to work very quickly,” Chief of Police Ilum adds.
“And do you often have to release criminals on these grounds? For failure to produce the evidence in time?”
“Occasionally.” Sten Bolund, the Deputy Chief of Police, spreads his hands. “But that is our problem. We are held responsible, and the democratically approved laws are not tampered with.”
Travelling on from Esbjerg, you reach the village of Skærbæk. You can enter the village just like any other, although it also hosts the Renbæk Regional Open Prison with 110 inmates and 62 staff. It comprises a group of cottages (cells of a sort), a small shop (the prison store), workshops, a byre, a football field, a golf course and a bus stop. Anybody at all can come here. A wife? A girlfriend? Yes – every day if they like, if you have finished your work. There are no fences or bars here. The only restriction on your freedom is that the houses – ordinary, cosy Scandinavian caravans – are locked at 2200 hours, and unlocked at 0700 by a supervisor who stays overnight with the prisoners. If you are not back by 2200 hours, that counts as an escape attempt. Nobody, however, will go running to look for you. This is considered to be an area of your personal responsibility, and nobody else’s. If you run away, when you are caught you will be transferred to a closed prison, where you will not be free again for a long time and will be allowed visits only once a week. And your sentence will be extended. You will lose the football, the golf, the privilege of personal responsibility and your subsistence allowance. In the open prison you have to feed yourself; each prisoner is allotted 40 kroner a day [£5] and has to buy food, prepare it, clear up and wash up in the kitchen of his little house. The logic behind Danish open prisons is that everything has to be worked for. Is that sensible? Yes. After all, you are not being sent on holiday for committing a robbery.
But here is the Governor of Renbæk, a pink-cheeked giant called Eric Pedersen. It is difficult to distinguish him from the prisoners walking through the village as none of them wear a uniform. The Governor invites us into the conference room, lights candles on the table, and, offering tea and coffee, tells us about his prisoners so that we should be under no illusions: the people walking these streets, playing football and tennis, are genuine criminals.
“The man who was happily playing table tennis when we went past murdered his wife. Fifteen per cent of the prisoners here are in prison for sexual crimes, 25 per cent for violence, and only 25 per cent for robbery.”
“Then isn’t this rather too soft? Perhaps they really are a danger to society and should be isolated?”
“What would be the sense of that? And what should be done with them afterwards, after they had served their time? Work is an obligatory part of being here. Or study, if you don’t already have secondary education. Studying in the classrooms is considered equivalent to working in the prison workshops. We regard this as an attempt at re-education.”
So much for Hamlet and “Denmark’s a prison.” Under the pressure of total democracy, prison, let alone the entire kingdom, resembles anything on earth before it resembles a prison.
Finally, we Russians are constantly hankering after being admitted to Europe. Not in a geographical sense, but as a fully valid European state in the Strasbourg sense. We talk and write a lot about this admirable ambition, and occasionally even fantasise that we are already there. However, it is time now to seek not just the forms but also the content, and that means we need to address our total lack of due legal process, and raise our game to the level of Denmark! To the level of Renbæk, of the gentlemanly Chief of Police, and of the Esbjerg Bridewell where they wholeheartedly like Russians.
PS. This article was prepared with the support of