HELPING CRIMINALS

The British T.V. chef Jamie Oliver has set up restaurants, using unemployed people, whom he then trains. A well-known chef in Denmark, Claus Meyer, is doing the same thing here. Except that he is using prisoners in the country's maximum security jail rather than the unemployed. The project is being shown as a fly-on-the-wall documentary on DR1, the Danish equivalent of the BBC.

And is already running into a fair amount of opposition. Victims object to the possibility of seeing their attackers on television, becoming quasi-celebrities in the process. More generally, is society doing too much to rehabilitate criminals and not enough to support victims? A question not confined to Denmark, of course.

I think Mr. Meyer has a good idea. But I think it was a mistake to turn it into an 8-part TV series.

Walter Blotscher