FIRST, WE KILL ALL THE CRIMINOLOGISTS.

Crime and punishment answers staring us in the face, (Garth George, New Zealand Herald, February, 17th, 2005)

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. [...]

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.

Can anyone point to any real improvements to society that have come from the social sciences?