Marc My Words… 27 July 2007
Political comment
By
Marc Alexander
When the answer is in front, they look the other way...

Some people give stupidity a bad name: the guiltiest of which are the liberal academics that, after years of incestuously indoctrinating themselves, need to validate themselves by trying to convince everybody else of their grand delusions. Unhappily their fertile imaginings can have a serious deleterious effect upon the public when similarly encoded ‘progressive’ liberal (as opposed to the classical sense), politicians jump on these dumb, expensive and impractical ideas and turn them into dumber, more costly, and even less pragmatic policies. Even worse when they put the public at greater risk. It’s as if the public were their unwitting lab-rats to be experimented with to prove that facts can sometimes be disregarded for the greater glory of a dogma.

Consider the vexed issue of parole. Year after year, decade after decade, we’ve witnessed a procession of attempts to deal with the fact that some people are so evil they will never be ‘fixed’. It’s a conclusion these academics and their apostate politicians cannot deal with. As a consequence we’ve reduced the proportion of a sentence before parole becomes possible, then, when that didn’t work, we lengthened it again. Then the thinking (and I use the term advisedly) was that it was not parole that was the problem but that its supervision was inadequate. Then we came up with a wondrous but hideously expensive Integrated Offender Management system. An academic solution which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the Ark intended to sail over the naysayers and herald a new era in prisoner rehabilitation. Sad then… that it floats as well as the Titanic.

On paper the idea sounds brilliant: tailor a rehabilitation program to each ‘residents’ specific needs. Give them lots of self-esteem because obviously, anyone as narcissistic as to put their own wants ahead of the morality of obeying the law, or to create a victim, clearly needs a boost. Counselling too, so the wife-bashing/rapist/thieving/murderous [delete where appropriate] criminal, in contradistinction to Copernicus, can feel as though they really are the centre of the universe. Provide a gym to ‘burn-off’ any residual anger towards real or imagined slights by parents unable to defend themselves; a token gesture of drug and alcohol rehab; and presto, we have a healthier, emotionally resurrected criminal prepared to meet the parole board spouting rehearsed lines about contrition…new found religion…blah blah blah.

And when things go wrong, when the reformed paragon of criminality betrays his promise of being a good boy to the parole board, what then? Experience, it would seem, is no great teacher to those who prefer to place their trust in the liberal academic establishment. There is a problem however, because the uneducated public are much too smart to be taken in. The great unwashed have difficulty in understanding that no-one is responsible, that the process is fine; all is well with the world.

The parole board, for all its sins, knows all to well that any remedy suggested by the public is akin to slinging a rope over the nearest tree. The commonsense of the public to demand punishment and retribution must be seen for what it is: a barbaric response that no 'learned' Parole Board appointee would ever confuse with how a 'progressive' civilisation should deal with crime. No… the parole board, their political advocates, and those who see a greater humanity in the criminal than in the victim know much better. The reality of higher, more horrific and violent crime rates during the last twenty years of progressive liberal thinking only means that we haven't quite got the mix right - it would never occur to these virtuous and humanist bureaucrats that they just might be wrong.

Plan B therefore, is to engage in damage control. Throw some money at an inquiry written incomprehensively by people with a string of letters after their names; conduct a PR campaign where the problem is denied (“it isn’t crime but the fear of crime that’s the real problem…”); and bring out an ‘expert’ to say why the present system should be maintained and enhanced. In other words throw more money at it.

Enter Renee Collette, vice chairwoman of the Canadian Parole Board[1]. She was here for a training seminar for the New Zealand Parole Board. Engineered, in part, to deal with the Graeme Burton case where a murderer and prison escaper was freed on parole and promptly went out and deprived Karl Kuchenbecker of his life. But lo and behold they have had similar cases in Canada. One for example, is a case about a man called Ulayuk. He had been serving a manslaughter conviction from 1988, claiming to be motivated by visions of having sex with a dead person. He stabbed a woman called Ammaq seven times, and then strangled her "to put her out of her misery." When released he then killed his parole officer. And, in a ‘monkey see-monkey do’ approach beloved by these apparatchiks, they decisively sprung into action and held an inquiry in which, surprise surprise, they found “no-one was at fault”. What was interesting though, was that prior to his latest slaughter, a "psychiatrist" confirmed the murderer as having "high reintegration potential."

This is the deja vous of bureaucratic idiocy. Someone must have spun the cosmic wheel and it was now the parole board's turn to have deplorable outcomes but, gee whiz, no-one to blame. I'm sure both Karl Kuchenbecker's family and the respective Canadian victim's families are relieved. Especially when Renee Collette hasn't changed her tune as a result of these deaths. She is apparently, "convinced of the virtue of the parole system."[2]

Maybe I'm not so easily satisfied. Because when this 'expert' goes on to say that the hardest job for a Parole Board is to divine the future, and the worst thing that can happen "is for that prediction to be proved wrong," it's as if someone just blew a tube of Wasabi up my nose: my blood boils.

Has it not escaped anyone’s attention that as a member of a Parole Board she has a vested interest in the institution? She derives her salary from it; gets trips overseas to attend seminars to sell it as a good idea; and has her words applauded by similarly incentivised promoters – of course she supports it! She's part of the problem.

It's all part and parcel of the idea that somehow we are all collectively responsible for some people doing bad things. We blame poverty. Why not? It's convenient. The problem with this idea is that as a nation, our wealth and living standards have sky-rocketed over the last two or three decades. The poor today live better than the middle class of half a century ago yet crime has shot up faster than a triple dose of Viagra at a nudist colony. Study after study has shown beyond doubt that it is not economics but an impairment of values that is at the heart of crime.

Lack of job? Again, research by those who put a premium on truth show clearly that for the bulk of criminals, work alone is not the elixir to a contributing lifestyle.[3] The motivation for violence is a lot more complex than simply a lack of employment, but much of it is aided and abetted by the continued reinforcement of a culture which asserts that the criminal underclass are not responsible for the way they choose to live their lives.

At the core of the issue is the distinct lack of credibility given by the apologists who create a climate of tolerance to behaviours which should never be tolerated. We can hardly expect the criminally inclined to believe in their own capacity to choose their social conduct when all the 'experts' have effectively abandoned it.

We can implement a successful justice system that not only costs less to taxpayers but also punishes, rehabilitates those that can be, reduces crime by deterring re-offending, and incarcerating for the term of natural life those who will never be anything but a continuing threat to the public, and honoring the needs of victims of crime. Too good to be true?

No not really. The biggest obstacle however, is not that we can't do these things, but the difficulty in persuading those in positions of authority to put them into practice. It seems incredulous that the most obvious explanations are the ones that attract the least attention from modern intellectual life. Regrettably it is the public who end up paying, both in cash and in their involuntary use as potential victims, to see whose theories are right. In the end it all comes down to one thing: some people are evil and they do evil things. It may not sound very academic but then, neither are the lives of the innocent who are being put at continued risk.

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[1] Mike Houlahan, "Divining future 'hardest job' for Parole Board", New Zealand Herald, 25 July 2007. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10453550

[2] Ibid.

[3] Christopher Uggen, "Work as a Turning Point in the Life Course of Criminals: A Duration Model of Age, Employment, and Recidivism," American Sociological Review, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Aug., 2000), pp. 529-546

ENDS

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