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With this post, I will complete my tribute to Nils Christie, who died on May 27th of this year in Oslo.  He is featured in the final broadcast of this six part series, first broadcast in 1994.  My starting point in this work was a claim made by American community organizer John McKnight in a profile I had done of him the year before, and also available on this site, called Community and Its Counterfeits.  In this series John McKnight claimed that society is composed of two distinct domains: an institutional domain, governed by legal, contractual and administrative norms - in a word,  bureaucracy - and a community domain, where citizens associate for their own purposes, and people matter for themselves.  These domains are distinct and incommensurable, but they are often confused.  This series explored various attempts to address situations normally treated institutionally within community.  It was recognized by the Canadian Association for Community Living with a plaque that hung proudly by the door of my office for many years afterwards.

The first three programmes of the series are taken up with an account of the work done by my friend David Schwartz when he was the director of the state of Pennsylvania's Developmental Disabilities Planning Council and related in a book he had then just published called Crossing the River: Creating a Conceptual Revolution in Community and Disability.  Two of his associates in the work of creating community alternatives to institutionalization, Sharon Gretz and Nancy Lee, are also featured.  The fourth programme begins with sociologist Peter Berger discussing a book he co-authored with Richard Neuhaus called To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy - a work that pleaded for a reinvigoration of civil society as a buffer between individuals and monopolistic mega-institutions.  It continues with Jerry Miller telling the remarkable story of how he dismantled the juvenile corrections system in Massachusetts after he was made the state's Commissioner of Youth in 1969, a story he also tells in his book Last One Over the Wall.  In the fifth programme Miller goes on to talk about his work with the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, an organization he found to deal with the ills of the American criminal justice system as a whole.  The series concludes, as I mentioned, with Nils Christie talking about his long association with Vidåsen, a Camphill community in Norway for people whom Nils liked to call "extraordinary" in preference to some more pejorative name.  Nils wrote about Vidåsen in a book called Beyond Loneliness and Institutions which also gave its name to the series.

Last week, in honour of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie who died May 27th in Oslo, I posted “Prison and Its Alternatives” a ten-hour series that was broadcast on Ideas in 1996.  The series responded to a request from Professor Christie that I help him to publicize the grave political emergency that he feared would be an inevitable consequence of rising rates of imprisonment in almost every industrialized country.   (I’ve posted some reminiscences, and a brief appreciation of Christie’s work in the blog section of the site.)  My ten programmes began with an investigation of the reasons why prison rates took such a dramatic U-turn in the 1980’s, after trending down for the thirty years that followed World Two.  Later shows in the series went on to canvas a variety of alternatives to imprisonment that were then being practiced and put forward under the banner of Restorative Justice.  Some time after the broadcast, I got a call from David Cole, an Ontario Court Judge.  He commended my work but invited me to “come and watch the parade” in his Scarborough court-room with a view to giving me a closer acquaintance with the day to day operations and dilemmas of the criminal justice system.  He followed up this lesson with an invitation to a conference of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association in Saskatoon, where the pros and cons of restorative justice would be considered.   So began “To Hurt or To Heal” a five hour sequel to “Prison and Its Alternatives,” that was more “balanced”, more focused on Canada and more concerned with practical issues in criminal justice than its predecessor.   I’ve listed the participants below, giving their qualifications as they were at the time of the broadcast in 2,000…

Part One – Edward Bayda, Chief Justice, Saskatchewan; John Braithwaite, author of Crime, Shame and Reintegration;  Cleve Cooper, Director of the RCMP’s Contract, Community and Aboriginal Policing Services; Bria Huculak, Saskatchewan judge; Danny Graham, Halifax lawyer, Nova Scotia restorative justice initiative

Part Two – Priscilla de Villiers, victims’ rights advocate; Lorraine Berzins, Church Council on Justice and Corrections; Jamie Scott, Collaborative Justice Project

Part Three – Kent Roach, law professor, University of Toronto; Julian Roberts, professor of criminology, University of Ottawa; David Paciocco, University of Ottawa, author of Getting Away With Murder; David Cole, Ontario judge

Part Four – Murray Sinclair, Manitoba judge; Sa’ke’j Henderson, Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan; Carol Laprairie, researcher on aboriginal justice issues; Jonathan Rudin, Director, Community Council, Aboriginal Legal Services, Toronto

Part Five – Tony Doob, professor of criminology, University of Toronto; Mary Campbell, Director, Criminal Justice Policy, Ministry of the Solicitor General; Ole Ingstrup, Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada; Jim Gouk, Reform/Alliance M.P. for Kootenay-Boundary-Okanagan; Allen Manson, professor of law, Queen’s University; Paul Gendreau, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, University of New Brunswick, St. John