KEY POINTS:
I got sent to prison when I was 13. And spent the next five years there.
It was an interesting time, that's for sure.
There wouldn't be many teenagers who get to rub shoulders with burglars, con men, rapists and murderers. Not on a regular basis, anyway.
Let's
be clear. My incarceration wasn't the result of "early onset conduct disorder" or anything. It was my Dad's doing, really.
See, he'd just been appointed prison chaplain at Paparua, and if he was going to the slammer, then so were us kids.
Prison chaplains were a novelty 45 years ago and Dad was one of the first. Being your standard, smug adolescent, convinced that age and incompetence were synonymous, I didn't appreciate how fit he was for the job.
I do now. He knew what it was to be a prisoner. He'd been one. An army padre during World War II, he was captured after choosing to stay with wounded soldiers in Crete and spent the next four years as a prisoner of war.
In 1945, with thousands of others, many weak and ill, he'd been marched across Germany, away from the Russians. When soldiers died on the side of the road, he was there.
When men said they couldn't keep going, he told them they could. When there was bread to break, he broke it.
Not that I heard about that from him - or very little, anyway. It was other people - some at the prison - who remembered those things.
But they were experiences which helped him to help those who were Her Majesty's unwilling guests at Paparua.
Forty-five years ago there wasn't a mighty task force of highly trained Corrections staff assiduously overseeing the William Bells and Graeme Burtons of this world. There wasn't much of anything, really.
When inmates convicted of serious crimes neared the end of their 10, 15 or 20-year sentences, the thought occurred that a little reintegration might be advisable.
So, at weekends, prisoners convicted of assault, burglary, rape, manslaughter or murder would arrive to mow the lawn, dig the garden, repair a fence then - often with surprising diffidence and timidity - join us for a meal.
Sometimes, Dad would tell us something of their crime and its causes. Talking to violent offenders, he'd noticed a pattern. Nearly all of them had, as children, been regularly beaten, often with wood or lengths of wire.
"That's all they know," he'd say. "They've been taught to react like that. It doesn't excuse what they did, but it helps to explain it."
Picking through the wreckage of those lives left him questioning the possibility of "rehabilitation".
"It implies there's something to 'rehabilitate'," he'd argue, "but often there isn't. A lot of these fellows have nothing to rebuild. You've got to start at the beginning."
The distinction between "habilitation" and "rehabilitation" is something that still doesn't seemed to have dawned on those who run our prisons.
Nor is that the only wisdom that's escaped them.
When his duffel-coat-radical number one son boldly told the chaplain that he was wasting his time because prison was no deterrent at all, the response was infuriatingly irrefutable.
"Maybe," Dad would chuckle. "But since the only people we know about are the ones who haven't been deterred by the thought of imprisonment, and since there's no way of knowing who has been, it's a false proposition."
Damn it, thought the radical. How can an old person be so ... logical?
Conversations like that lie dormant in the memory until some unexpected awfulness brings them sharply back to mind.
Discovering that the 16-year-old who stole a car, killed two people and seriously injured two others will spend a mere three months in a youth centre is one such awfulness.
It instantly resurrects the imponderable question of deterrence and what, if any, influence the prospect of meaningful punishment might have had on this apparently indifferent youth.
There's no doubt what the public believe. Or want.
The only question most people have is, how soon can we get it?
Sadly, this week's other awfulness, at Virginia Tech, inspires an even more frightening question: how soon will we get it?
The past may help to answer that. During the 1960s there was a spate of patricides - sons killing their fathers.
Trying to make sense of this, my father concluded it wasn't the easy availability of weapons or the lurid violence of fiction that triggered these events.
His theory was that reportage of the first killing had stripped away the last constraint keeping other angry sons in check.
That constraint was the belief they must, by definition, be the only boys alive who harboured such dreadful, homicidal impulses.
Discovering that they weren't somehow validated their murderous impulse and removed the restraint of unique shame.
So they became "copycat killers" - because they'd been told what to copy.
Reality had unleashed an urge they'd struggled to control. It gave them permission to mimic the actions of others.
And the same thing happened in Virginia this week.
In a world where live reports and pictures from cellphones are regarded as an unchallenged right, this raises a disquieting prospect.
If it is true that the most appalling impulses can be sanctioned by reportage, then we are obliged to accept that while ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine of us are appalled by images like those seen around the world this week, one person in every 100,000 will see them as permission.
And that person could live here ...
