Dialogue: Draconian sentencing step towards lynching

How's this for an idea that would help to make us a more understanding, more rounded, less bourgeois society? Instead of following the example of many European countries and insisting that young people undertake military training over a two-year period, we should require New Zealanders on reaching 18 to give service to the community, rotating among hospitals, mental hospitals, old people's homes and prisons.

That way they would give more thought to complex social issues and not respond so banally to one-question referendums* such as those on the size of Parliament and longer sentences for violent criminals.

If anything, Parliament has too few legislators to cope with the increasingly complex issues of a modern developed nation.

In Australia and the United States, many regions not much more populous than this country have layers of city, state and federal legislatures. Because we don't have a state level, we should have more parliamentarians to get a wider spread of expertise or we should federate with Australia, if they'd be bothered nowadays.

But more seriously, the overwhelming result in favour of longer sentences for violent criminals has led its promoter, Norm Withers, to arrogantly, almost off-handedly, castigate all judges for incompetence. To him and his associates the issue is simple draconian punishment without remission for any crime tinged by violence.

Because of the result of the simple plebiscite, Withers has become the spokesman for those who think that once laws are made and sentences defined, no human judgment on the individuality of offenders or their circumstances should be interposed.

The belief that the result of a single-question referendum gives some democratic imprimatur to a kind of one-size-fits-all penal system can only be held by a mind lacking subtlety and imagination.

I can understand the anger that wells up when some psychopath maims or kills an innocent person for the satisfaction of his or her own perverted needs. But to insist that that anger is the one impulse on which justice should depend is to move towards lynching.

The implication that all judges are wimps, wet liberals sympathetic to criminals is as stupid as an insistence that they never make mistakes. We all accept that some criminals should be shut up and the key thrown away.

I remember years ago a grizzled old senior sergeant of police saying to me that in his career of apprehending he had met some criminals so bad as to be beyond the possibility of any reform. But, he added, over all his years of service they would not number more than a dozen.

So if young people spent time caring for the sick, the senile, the incapable elderly, the mentally ill and criminals they would be better informed and better equipped emotionally to think and to respond to proposed legislation on how to handle the disadvantaged among us. And when I say disadvantaged, I mean criminals as well. They would find that the great majority of them are sad victims of their own inadequacy.

I'm not so naive as to think such compulsory social service is politically feasible. Neither middle-class youngsters nor their parents would want them sullied by the reality of contact with those among us who are socially tainted. Those who would howl loudest at the very idea of it would be those most fearful of the emotional engagement it would require. Pity. I think we would make enormous strides as a society.

Remember when a substantial minority of New Zealanders lived in state houses or near them at least? Now, community groups band together to keep state houses out of their suburbs because of the debasement of property values that may follow.

Well, I've lived in the middle of a state house suburb for 20 years and enjoyed every moment of it, both the highs and the sometimes-testing lows. I've never been burgled and the friends I've made among the neighbours rank with the most valued I have. I certainly admire them more than any of my well-off mates.

One other thing: an inference assumed by many of those who seek greater punishment for crimes of violence is that we were once relatively free from it, that we are going to the dogs. That isn't so.

When I was young there was far more low-level violence in families and schools than nowadays and, in my experience, a higher degree of condoned, low-level corruption within the professions, the police force and the justice system. Perhaps we are reaping that harvest.

Perhaps some time I'll tell you some of the exploits of the alcoholic stipendiary magistrate who once drove his car into a ditch and, because he was too drunk to get out, was removed by the police and driven home.

And I could explain how disbelieving my friends were when I told them my father never laid a hand on me. It was so rare I became too embarrassed to talk about it.

* To all those pedants who would normally send me "Gotcha!" letters on the grounds that the correct plural of referendum is referenda, save yourself the stamp. For one thing, "dums" is Herald style, for another the major dictionaries, including the Oxford, are closely in pursuit of usage and give "dums" as the preferred form over "da."