This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello. It's rare in academic life to come across someone whose intellectual stance seems almost

inseparable from their personality. But Neils Christie, the Norwegian criminologist who died last week, aged 85, was one such person. His gentle, tolerance, slightly ry take on life was perfectly a one with a manner in which he conveyed his academic concerns

about the expansion of the criminal law and the concomitant increases in the use of imprisonment

as a sanction.

When he spoke to me on this program back in 2004, he was in his typically

gentle way regretting the examples of these trends which could then be

observed in the UK.

There is an endless amount of acts with dislike,

deplorable acts.

We cannot fight all of it, and we don't look at all of it as crime.

But by various processes, we select something.

And then it is a cultural question for any nation.

How much of the unwanted do we really want to look at as if it was crime?

You reach no Eastern European standards of imprisonment and I think it is such a pity because you were once upon a time such a

civilized society.

Once we were civilized.

Neil's Chris, a fine criminologist and a fine human being.

Now, Nieels what I know have been intrigued and exercised

by the matter to which we now turn.

The question of blame.

Now, although much of my own academic life was spent teaching criminology, questions about

...