Nils Christie

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Nils Christie (24 February 1928 – 27 May 2015) was a Norwegian sociologist and criminologist. He was a professor of criminology at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Law and is regarded as a leading figure in his field. He and Thomas Mathiesen are the two Norwegian social scientists highlighted in the book 50 Key Thinkers in Criminology.

Christie was born in Oslo. He finished upper secondary school in 1946 and briefly worked as a journalist in the late 1940s. He earned a Master of Arts degree in 1953 from the University of Oslo, majoring in sociology with minors in psychology and criminology. His 1959 doctoral thesis, Young Norwegian Offenders, compared all male lawbreakers born in 1933 with others born the same year.

He became a docent at the University of Oslo in 1959 and is often seen as Norway’s first professor of criminology at the faculty in 1966. Christie wrote many influential books, including Limits to Pain (1981), Crime Control as Industry (2000), A Suitable Amount of Crime (2004), and If Schools Didn't Exist (1971; English edition 2020). He was well known for his criticisms of drug prohibition, industrial society, and prisons. He believed that to understand crime we must study how society is organized, and that social scientists should influence society through public debate. He argued that the term "crime" is imprecise and that what is considered criminal is about society’s judgments of unwanted acts. His analysis of "the ideal victim" (1986) is one of his most influential contributions.

Christie was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and received an honorary degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1996. In 2001 he won the Fritt Ord Freedom of Expression Prize for his original and independent contributions to public debate. His early work Prison Guards in Concentration Camps (1952) was later included in the Norwegian Sociology Canon (2009–2011).

He married Vigdis Margit Moe in 1951 and later married sociologist Hedda Giertsen. Christie died in Oslo at the age of 87.