What Is Nils Christie Conflicts As Property

The article Conflicts as Property by Nils Christie was published in the British Journal of Criminology in 1977. Christie suggests in this article that the conflicts of the individual are a valuable property to be owned and that in highly industrialized societies, conflicts have largely become the possessions of legal professionals rather than of those who are directly involved. Christie views this system, which most western legal systems follow, as one that should be abolished in order to more efficiently rehabilitate the offender through reconciliation with the victim as well as those within the community. This summary will outline Christie’s arguments as to why the current legal practices of the justice system are harmful to society as well
as his proposed alternative solution of true lay-orientated courts; in addition to this, the theoretical values and flaws associated with this structure will be identified. Although one may agree with the notion that conflicts may be viewed as property, it is debatable whether or not it is beneficial for victims to be involved in their own conflicts or if Christie’s proposed solution is one that is plausible in a state with complex social systems such as Canada due to the issues with restorative justice attempts made in similar nations like New Zealand.
In the article, Christie argues that victims of crime in western societies often have very little involvement with their own legal conflicts. According to Christie, lawyers are trained to prevent and solve conflicts and that by the very procedures of doing so, the conflicts are being disassociated from their owners and assumed by legal professionals; who are referred to by Christie as ‘professional thieves” in the article as they essentially robing the victim of the chance to participate in their own conflict. The problem with this is that “Lawyers are, as we saw, trained into agreement on what is relevant in a case. But that means a trained incapacity in letting the parties decide what they think is relevant”, which Christie believes denies the opportunity for social participation in norm-clarification. He argues that this practice is dangerous for the progression of society as it attributes to segmentation. Christie outlines two major segmentations in highly industrialized societies: segmentation of space and of biological attributes. He states that both these types of segmentation lead to a depersonalization of social life and killed local communities; As consequence, “This creates a situation with limited amounts of information with regard to each other. We do know less about other people, and get limited possibilities both for understanding and for prediction of their behavior”. According to Christie, as a result “certain conflicts are made completely invisible, and thereby don’t get any decent solution whatsoever”. He proposes that for crime prevention, re-creating social conditions in necessary so that conflicts may be more visible and thus more manageable. For Christie, this change in social condition is a shift to lay-orientated courts, a court of nonprofessional equals representing themselves who have a solid base outside of the crime control system.
The purpose of this article is to inform people about the societal limitations that are imposed by professionalism as well as to address a hypothesized solution to said limitations.
Christie has accomplished this by exposing some of the underlying negative traits of western legal systems, thus forcing the reader to consider the legitimacy of them; However, he did not provide enough empirical evidence to support his claim that the type of court system he suggested would be possible to adopt successfully. While Christie does acknowledge the hindrances to the development of lay-oriented courts within western culture, his arguments for its potential success are more idealistic than fact based. He only provides examples of true local/lay-oriented courts in non-western cultures, making it difficult to asses whether or not it would be plausible here. A system of restorative process for youths was conducted in New Zealand and like Canada, follows the Westminster system – making it a good candidate for comparison. Although New Zealand is the most well developed example of a restorative justice system such as the one Christie proposes in the article, research shows that “It has been less successful in achieving goals of enhancing the wellbeing of the young people who enter the system and ensuring that they have the skills to be effectively reintegrated into society as people with a potential to contribute to society as well as to benefit from the rewards of participation”. Christie
also seems to fail to consider the fact that it might not always be beneficial for the victim of a crime to be personally involved in their own conflict. According to research on victim experiences in restorative justice,
Several studies report that some victims have anxieties and fears about participating in a process where they interact with the offender and that they may feel pressured to participate […] Such findings suggest a possibility that victims and their needs can easily be marginalized, and in some cases, even re-victimized by restorative processes.
When this occurs, victims may not experience restorative
outcomes.

In conclusion, there seems to be a significant difference between the theoretical ideals of Christie’s article and the reality of those theories in practice. While Christie raises various strong arguments against current modern legal systems, his article still lacks enough empirical evidence to support his claims. Further research is needed in order to determine whether or not it is beneficial for victims to be involved in their own conflicts or if Christie’s proposed solution is one that is plausible in a state with complex social systems such as Canada due to the issues with restorative justice attempts made in similar nations like New Zealand.