Christie, Nils. "Conflicts as Property". The British Journal of Criminology, Vol.17, No.1 (1977): 1-15.

Christie, Nils. "Conflicts as Property". The British Journal of Criminology, Vol.17, No.1 (1977): 1-15.

• The author expresses a concern that the current system of criminal justice in modern, industrial societies has deprived victims of crime from the direct involvement in conflict resolution to which they have a 'legitimate right'. Dr. Christie suggests that the payoff of preventing personal vendettas is not worth the negative effects of a depersonalized criminal justice system (1).
• In contrast to the formalized and impersonal system of criminal justice in industrialized states, the author describes personalized court proceedings in Arusha, Tanzania, in which the disputing party was central and active in the proceedings and what officials existed had a passive role as experts (2).
• "There is one truth which is seldom revealed in the literature of the law [...] The truth is that, for the most part, the business of the criminal courts is dull, commonplace, ordinary and after a while downright tedious " (2).
• Courts in most modern industrialized nations, taking Scandinavia as an example, are peripheral from everyday life and exist on the official outskirts of experience. As physical buildings, courts are far away from residences, and constructed in confusing ways which require experience in the building to navigate. Inside courts, the parties are also marginalized in the court proceedings, with their official advocates taking the active role in the court (3).
• Dr. Christie argues that this professionalization marginalizes the victim in negative ways. In criminal cases, the victim is represented by the state to the degree that the narrative and desires of the victim are excluded from the process. The author contests that this is a secondary victimization: the victim of the offender then has her 'rights' to the case stolen by the state (3).
• The author cautions against the trends in criminology of reducing the victim and offender from persons with experiences to mean entities acted upon by biological factors or socio-economic conditions. Whereas racialism and eugenics dominated 'old' criminology, the 'new' criminology risks giving the same status to social factors and removing the personal from criminal cases (5).
• This rationalization of individual and personal criminal conflicts within larger biological or social explanations is a method to deprive the victim and offender of 'ownership' of that conflict. If the cause of the conflict is not personal, than the rights of the victim to that conflict become weaker (5).
• The authors suggests that the segmentation of society into distinct, and usually non-overlapping, social spheres in which contacts in one sphere to not enter other spheres of life, has been a depersonalizing phenomenon which limits human understanding and allows experts and professionals to take conflicts away more easily (5-6).
• Conflicts represent the potential for participation and activity in the cross-sectional environment of criminal justice. This potential only becomes more important in modern industrialized societies, where other opportunities for this kind of engagement have disappeared (7).
• The professionalization of criminal proceedings also remove any chance for the victim to know or understand the offender. Rather than allowing the victim resolution by understanding the harm done, the impersonal nature of modern criminal justice only reinforces narratives of the inhuman criminal (8).
• The offender also loses opportunities that may have made the penal process less punitive or more understandable: "The offender has lost the opportunity to explain himself to a person whose evaluation of him might have mattered. He has thereby also lost one of the most important possibilities for being forgiven" (9).
• The depersonalization and professionalization of criminal justice remove opportunities for societal norm creation. In particular, lawyers depend on a set of arguments enshrined in the law, although they do not necessarily focus on the arguments that mean the most to victims or offenders. Allowing increased participation by victims and offenders would allow the law to establish the importance of non-legalistic factors, like employment, martial states, and other circumstances to the crime (8).
• The author highlights the fact that most criminals are extremely unwilling to confront their victims or close family members, and in fact prefer the current depersonalized system that leaves them out of any direct contact with the parties they have harmed (9).
• Dr. Christie stresses that this system of criminal justice could not be more lenient or more comfortable for criminals, in fact it would almost certainly be less so, but that it may result in lower rates of recidivism (9).
• The 'victim-oriented court' suggested by the author is separated into multiple stages. The initial stage would function as conventional courts, with legal proceedings to determine guilt. The second part of the court, however, would involve the victim and offender giving testimony of damage done and directly suggesting appropriate measures for resolving the conflict. After this victim-centered process, the judge would issue a sentence taking into account those concerns (10).
• The full exposition of the circumstances of the offender would also provide an opportunity for the community to meet the needs made explicit through his testimony (10).
• This system of criminal justice is much more lay-oriented, with roles generally deprofessionalized and the unprofessional victim and offender taking prominence in court proceedings. Judges should be broadly depressionalized, and lawyers and legal experts should be omitted from all aspects of the criminal justice process except for the initial determination of guilt (11-12).
• The author raises three major problems with the proposed victim-centered court system: the lack of neighborhoods with enough social capital to support the system, the lack of individual -- rather than corporate -- victims, and the massive numbers of professionals in modern society (12).
• The author responds to the idea that neighborhoods lack the social capital to sustain these localized and personal court system by suggesting that the implementation of localized courts would supply the very arenas where social capital could be accumulating, this solving the problem (12).