KEY POINTS:
What does justice look like?
Pat wouldn't know because he's fairly sure he didn't get it after being threatened by a knife-wielding teenager a few years ago.
He'd confronted the teenager as he was trying to break into a car; fortunately, the police were quickly on the scene.
Pat went to the family group conference afterwards and decided to forgive. He asked only that the boy join the junior rugby team he coached, and help clean up graffiti around the neighbourhood.
But although Pat arranged to pick him up for training, it soon became clear that the boy wasn't interested. A couple of months later, Pat was told there'd been another family group conference to which he hadn't been invited, and that it had been decided to send the boy to Samoa for a year.
"I felt completely let down by the system and it is fair to say that I felt my genuine forgiveness was thrown back in my face."
So you see, he wrote, forgiveness doesn't always work. I told him forgiveness doesn't ask anything in return; it wouldn't be an act of grace otherwise. But justice does.
Even restorative justice requires atonement and restitution. If you ask the head of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment project, former police senior sergeant Kim Workman, what that kind of justice looks like, he'd say it looks like love. It's about "repair, reconciliation and the reduction of harm". It's about healing the broken-hearted and promoting community peace.
Love is, I know, not our preferred approach to justice in this country. We'd rather talk about seriously bad people who deserve to be put away for the rest of their lives (and hardly anyone would argue that there aren't a few of those around).
Since the 1999 election ushered in Helen Clark's government, restorative justice has been mostly sidelined for a more punitive path. Back then, a citizens-initiated referendum asked whether we should place "greater emphasis on the needs of victims", impose minimum sentences and require "hard labour" for all serious violent offences.
Nearly 92 per cent of us said "yes", and Labour duly obliged with legislation that introduced, for example, a minimum prison term starting at 17 years (up from 10) for those convicted of aggravated murder; preventive detention applied to a wider group; and offenders sentenced to over two years serving an average of 72 per cent of their sentence, up from 52 per cent seven years ago.
That resulted in the most dramatic increase in prison numbers in our history, making it necessary to build four new prisons at a cost of around a billion dollars. We didn't get hard labour. But it's ironic that Labour finds itself accused of being too soft on crime.
Workman thinks that punitive approach reflected a fondness for market solutions and "a growing opposition to policies that appear to benefit the "undeserving poor", cynicism about welfare, and support for more aggressive controls for an underclass that is perceived to be disorderly, drug-prone, violent and dangerous.
"St Augustine once said, 'Mercy without justice leads to weakness. Justice without mercy leads to tyranny.' He was talking about the balance that should be shown to all involved in the judicial process.
"That is no longer appropriate, and the sympathy evoked by political rhetoric centres exclusively on the victims and the fearful public, rather than the offender."
This seems unlikely to change any time soon. As each week brings another front-page assault or murder, the public clamour for simplistic and harsh solutions to a perceived crime epidemic grows louder.
It doesn't help that some of our politicians have a vested interest in beating up crime.
When John Key says violent crime is up 47 per cent under Labour, he's overstating the case. The picture looks more complex when you factor in population growth, the fact that violent crime has been trending steadily upwards since the 1960s (the most dramatic spike was 1992-95), and that criminologists have attributed much of the growth to the increase in intimidation and threats, and increasing awareness of family violence.
Which is not to say that violence isn't a problem. But working out the causes is notoriously difficult. What's clear is that this is too important for political point-scoring.
Andrew Coyle, professor of prison studies at King's College, London, notes that differences in imprisonment rates between comparable countries reflect fear of crime and the "different attitudes to the treatment of people who are at the margins of society: those who are mentally ill, who are addicted to drugs including alcohol, who are homeless, who come from minority ethnic groups".
At least half of those in our prisons are mentally ill, and around 80 per cent have alcohol or drug addictions, suggesting a failure of health and social support rather than inherent badness. And that can't be justice.
* tapu.misa@gmail.com
