From a twenty-seven-page letter by Anders Behring Breivik sent last October to corrections officials in Norway. Breivik is currently serving a twenty-one-year sentence in a maximum-security prison near Oslo for murdering seventy-seven people in 2011. Translated from the Norwegian by Julia Grønnevet.

I quickly realized that the rubber safety pen isn’t functional enough for extensive writing. I therefore asked for access to a pencil and a ballpoint pen. I was refused verbally. The rubber pen enables the writing of approximately five to ten words per minute and precludes editing. A pencil or ballpoint pen with an eraser enables the…