Garth George: Crime and punishment answers staring us in the face

It seems to me that when it comes to law and order and crime and punishment we as a nation have totally lost the plot. And it further seems that no one - and I mean no one - has any answers to the constant increase in criminal behaviour and the burgeoning prison population.

The Government can tell us as often and as loudly as it likes that crime figures are down, but anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows instinctively that is just not true and that any statistics put forward to justify the contention have somehow been tweaked to make them look good.

That should surprise no one, for the smoke-and-mirrors spin-doctoring at which socialist governments are always so adept has, after nearly six years of practice, reached a competence and crescendo unsurpassed in our political history.

The latest panjandrum to pronounce on the subject of crime and punishment is the Chief Justice, Dame Sian Elias, in an address which she entitled "Criminology in the age of talkback". And that in its patronising self would have been enough to turn most "ordinary" New Zealanders right off, for it indicates that those in judicial authority consider that the man and woman in the street have nothing useful to contribute to the debate.

Similarly, those who criticise the organisation and philosophy of the police are dismissed out of hand by people like Minister Hawkins, Commissioner Robinson and top traffic cop Kelly because obviously in their view we don't know what we're talking about.

(Doesn't it make you yearn for the days when the public told the politicians and bureaucrats what to do and not the other way round?)

Dame Sian in her somewhat impenetrable prognostications to a conference of criminologists in Wellington conceded that the level of crime was a source of proper concern.

"Popular anxieties," she said early on, "are never an easy background for scientific discourse. There are no simple answers ... "

It would not have occurred, of course, to our exalted Chief Justice that if we did away with a lot of the scientific discourse about crime and punishment and reverted to a bit of plain old common sense, some simple answers might be available after all.

For instance, in her address Dame Sian told us that in the past 20 years crime rates have risen dramatically and that between 1985 and 1999 the prison population had increased by 99 per cent.

She does not appear, however, to attach any significance to those dates, yet they jumped right off the page at me. Why? Because 1985 was the year of the start of the Rogernomics revolution, which generated an economic, political and social upheaval the extent and consequences of which could never have been envisaged.

It was also a time when the new age philosophy of political correctness - particularly everybody has rights but never mind responsibilities - began to achieve widespread currency.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people lost their once-secure jobs and became marginalised if not alienated from society as a whole.

The more or less egalitarian society which had put us at the international forefront of social welfare practice became infected by greed and not only created a new class of poor but hugely extended the gap between the rich and the rest.

The public service was gutted and transformed instead into a series of money-grubbing service industries, their officials more intent on pleasing their political masters than providing the services for which the taxpayer paid them.

Which brings me to the core of the matter. The main reason for out-of-control crime rates and overcrowded prisons is that the philosophy of service to the community provided by the law and order, justice and penal systems has been irretrievably corrupted.

There are simple ways to lower the incidence crime and recidivism. Jurists, criminologists and other such experts in scientific discourse will tell you they won't work and trot out a million arcane reasons why; and politicians will tell you they cost too much. But here they are anyway:

We need more police and we need them on the streets and not pushing paper in undermanned police stations. A constant and visible police presence throughout our central city, suburbs and shopping centres, plus strict attention to "petty" offences, would do more to reduce crime than all the scientific discourse in the world.

We need our judges - many of whom are infected with an overdose of idealistic humanitarianism having listened to scientific discourse - to be taught to recognise criminals for what they are and make the punishment fit the crime and not the circumstances thereof.

And we need a prison system - manned by men only in men's prisons and women only in women's, who have never heard a scientific discourse in their lives - that provides an uncomfortably spartan environment and not a standard of living which to many inmates is better than they've had in their lives.

We need to make prisons places that criminals do not want to go back to, places where there is hard, physical work, profitable to the prison service, to be done at least eight hours a day; plain food with no trimmings; inflexible discipline; no television or radio except, perhaps, in a public room at restricted times; strictly rationed exercise; and rare, no-contact visiting privileges.

And that's just a start.