IN NORWAY, CRIMINALS WAIT A LONG TIME TO SERVE TIME

Surge in Drugs, Thefts Means Crooks Wait Years for a Cell

OSLO - Aida Hassan was halfway through a routine day in the office
when her boyfriend called. "I must tell you something," he said. "Can
you come home for lunch?"

The couple had met in a disco four years earlier. Then they had a
child, bought a house and settled into suburban life. They talked
about getting married.

Now Vidar Sandli had shocking news: The next day, he would go off to
prison.

In 1998, four months before he asked Ms. Hassan for their first dance,
Mr. Sandli was arrested with nearly 4-1/2 pounds of hashish. Norway's
strict drug laws got him a three-year prison sentence. But because the
country is chronically short on jail space and he hadn't committed a
violent crime, Mr. Sandli was told he would wait months or even years
to do his time. In the meantime, he cleaned up his life - but didn't
tell his new love about the ghost in his past. When he finally had no
choice, "my whole body just collapsed," Ms. Hassan recalls.

Here in Norway, they call it the "prison queue." The system reflects
Norway's long humanitarian tradition and mild attitude toward
imprisonment. At 60 inmates per 100,000 citizens, Norway has one of
the lowest incarceration rates in the Western world. The U.S. rate is
about 700. One Norwegian prison in Bastoey is on an island where
inmates live in wooden cottages and can fish, raise vegetables and
cook out.

Nils Christie, a criminologist at the University of Oslo, calls the
queue "a sign of a civil and humane society because it indicates that
most criminals are ordinary people, able to wait in line just like
other people."

But today Norway has a rising crime rate, and the queue is getting out
of hand. In the past four years, the line of convicts waiting to do
their time nearly tripled to 2,762 -- roughly the same size as the
entire Norwegian prison population of 2,900 inmates.

"There's more violence, more drugs, more thefts," laments Carl-Hugo
Lund, a district judge in a sparsely populated area near the Swedish
border. When he convicts people, they often ask when the sentence will
start. His typical response: "I don't know."

Lawyers, judges and politicians are starting to complain that the
queue is unfair both to victims and criminals, and could undermine the
whole point of the criminal-justice system. Adding to their worries
are plans to lengthen prison sentences for some serious crimes,
further worsening wait times.

"The queue is definitely a problem," acknowledges Torgeir Heimli,
assistant director-general of the corrections department at Norway's
Ministry of Justice. To provide swifter justice, Norway plans to build
its first new prison since 1997 and recently converted a shuttered
military camp into a 40-bed facility. Corrections officials hope to
add at least 450 new prison beds by 2006. The Justice Ministry also
hopes lawmakers can free up more cells by allowing judges to impose
fines and community service instead of prison time for minor offenses
such as smoking marijuana.

Meanwhile, Norwegian criminals keep lining up -- and counting the days
until their lockup. "Going to prison is a down period in your life.
You want to put it behind yourself as soon as possible," says Terje
Christensen, a 44-year-old former papermill worker living in the small
town of Askim. Mr. Christensen was sentenced last year to 24 days in
prison following a drunken run-in at a local club. After ignoring
bouncers' request to leave, police say Mr. Christensen punched an
officer, an accusation he denies.

In Limbo

Mr. Christensen, suffering from diabetes and arthritis and living on
government disability checks, worries that the limbo could scare off
potential employers. He also wonders if he'll be able to use airplane
tickets he booked to take his family on a vacation this summer. "It's
not so easy to plan for the future if you don't know when you'll have
to go to jail," he says.

While most of the convicted criminals in Norway's prison queue are
convicted of relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, a small minority are
guilty of serious offenses such as spouse abuse and indecent exposure.
The worst offenders, including anyone convicted of murder or rape, are
sent straight to prison. The average criminal spends 77 days in line.

Eva Frivold, a lawyer in Askim, near Oslo, says one of her clients was
beaten by her husband, who got a sentence of several months in prison.
Before reaching the front of the line, the man attacked his wife
again, forcing her to flee to a women's shelter. Ms. Frivold says
victims ask the same question over and over: Why don't attackers go to
jail right away?

Mr. Heimli, the Norwegian corrections official, acknowledges that
delaying the lockup of criminals may rattle their victims. He says new
crimes by people stuck in the queue aren't common.

During his four-year wait, Mr. Sandli was dogged by headaches and
sleepless nights because of uncertainty over when he'd be imprisoned.
"Every time I wanted to tell her, I'd say: 'No, no, no,' " Mr. Sandli
recalled during a Sunday visit home from prison. "But the longer I
waited, the more difficult it became."

Mr. Sandli, now 40 years old, had been arrested while on his way to
sell hashish, and cops later found a stash in his apartment. He
pleaded guilty to drug possession and dealing. He has no other
criminal record, according to his lawyer.

Putting It Off

Three months into the prison queue, Mr. Sandli spotted Ms. Hassan, but
kept the conviction to himself. Every time Mr. Sandli thought he had
found the courage to tell her, something got in the way. First, his
girlfriend's estranged ex-husband and father of her two children
committed suicide. Ms. Hassan's own father died about a year later,
and then so did Mr. Sandli's. He quit asking his lawyer to put him
behind bars as fast as possible.

Ms. Hassan, who is 38, knew her boyfriend had been mixed up in drugs,
but she thought the problems were over once he landed a job in a print
shop. After his conviction, Mr. Sandli barbecued on the front porch,
cleaned the house and developed an obsession for mowing the lawn so
closely that it looked like a putting green. Their son was born in
October 2000.

On the day he confessed, Ms. Hassan first felt angry, and then sorry
for Mr. Sandli. She told her two older children that the man they
viewed as their stepfather would be locked up. The boys asked if he
would have any food there. The next day, Ms. Hassan drove Mr. Sandli
to prison, with the kids in the backseat.

Ms. Hassan never thought of leaving Mr. Sandli. "I forgave him," she
says. But dealing with his disappearance isn't easy. Her monthly
salary of 15,000 kroner ($2,185 or ^1,900) barely covers the mortgage
payment, so their two mothers pitch in with money and
babysitting.

Yet there are moments when it feels as if Mr. Sandli still is there.
During dinners with friends, Ms. Hassan often sets out a glass of
cognac for her absent boyfriend. He could be freed in December, a year
early, if he is a model inmate.

Mr. Sandli sees one silver lining. If he had been sent to jail right
away, he says, he never would have met Ms. Hassan. "At least something
good came out of it."