According to Simon Power, “A male teenager on the wrong side of the tracks and heading towards a life of crime will cost society $3 million over his lifetime.” I don’t doubt it. I’d be ready to believe it costs far more, especially if you factor in the anguish suffered by his victims. Power said this to at a Victoria University-run conference, the “Costs of Crime”, in Wellington yesterday. He was attempting to give an example of the importance of preventing crime in the first place.
Yes yes, here we go down the same old track, the kind of knee jerk reaction that springs from batting about other cliches like the “ambulance at the bottom of the cliff” and all that rubbish. Stuff I’ve been hearing all my life while crime and violence steadily increases. “We all know that if we can stop people from getting on the carousel of crime in the first place then the savings – not only monetary but also in terms of human cost – will be huge,” Mr. Power droned on. The Herald reports-
Government spending on police, corrections and justice has roughly doubled to $3.4 billion in the past 14 years, adjusted for inflation, with little overall effect on crime – total recorded crime is falling, but violent crime is increasing – and a prison population that was bursting at the seams. Recidivism rates have worsened.
Mr Power pushed the Government’s work on the drivers of crime, including help for vulnerable young parents, early intervention programs and tackling alcohol harm. “Research suggests that if successful early intervention occurs with the 5 to 10 per cent of children with the most severe behavioral problems, there is the potential for a 50 to 70 per cent overall reduction in adult criminal activity and associated poor life outcomes,” Mr Power said.
Just the kind of stuff the drooling idiot liberals at Victoria University would lap up.
But he had to defend the Government’s policy priorities to the audience, who accused the Government of supporting punitive, populist policies such as the three-strikes law and juvenile boot camps over evidence-based – but politically unpopular – solutions.
Mr Power, how about we stop pissing in the pockets of simpering liberal academics without an idea between the lot of them and talk the real reasons for crime? Its is nothing to do with early intervention. Once there was very little crime and we had no need of the measures you propose as solutions today. Because we had a sane society.
Look at the damn stats for God’s sake, and you can see that crime has increased at a rate comparable with society’s plunge into the bottomless abyss of Progressive political and social ideas. Ideas that have resulted in a deliberate break down of morality, the destruction of the family unit, the propagation of single parent families, the denigration of fathers and families and motherhood at the expense of the doctrine of feminism, an increasing dependence upon drug and alcohol use and so many other events that have at their root the false prophets of moral relativism and/or cultural Marxism and/or Gramsci-ism as embraced and propagated by the very idiots you are speaking to. From Victoria university and almost every other NZ and Western university.
Ever since those bastards have been preaching their evil doctrine this country and almost every other western country has been in a clearly evident death spiral. And all this time we have had the same worthless posturing fools as you Mr Power speaking the same empty words to the same empty academic vessels and the spiral just continues to accelerate.
The graph says all that needs to be said, except for the period preceding 1950 when the line was a barely discernible level and with no real upturns at all relative to those that occurred after Progressive social and political policies became ascendant in this country. We need a complete turn about Mr. Power. We need to stop voting for politicians like you, but most of all, we need to free this country from the influence of the politically driven cultural Marxists who control Victoria and so many of our universities. They, Progressives all, who by their bad ideas brought us this insane destruction, are the true cause of crime.
TrueblueNZ 
Good post…
My opinion: more stick, less carrot…
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Good post Red. A blind man could see the primary causes of violent crime increasing, but as they say, “there are none so blind as those who will not see”.
What gets me is the “either/or” nature of the debate. Why not spend on targeted prevention programs as well as punitive programs (such as 3 strikes).
And while we’re at it, why don’t we spend less on making prison a “home away from home”? If we spend less on flat-screen TVs and fillet steak, we could afford to build a shit-load more container cells to house the scum. If prison was less appealing (no flat screen TV, etc.) maybe the scum would not fall over themselves quite so readily to get into prison in the first place?
I guess this is something Progressives like FIGJAM Power will never understand. Their solution is to give the scum a cuddle and send them to the naughty spot to think about what they’ve done.
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Power is part of the problem, not part of the solution. An amoral nation cannot be governed by laws. New laws, changes to laws, new prisons, changes to prisons may have an effect but they do not deal with the basic problem and that is the decline in personal morality and its almost non-existence at some levels of society.
Crime was practically a non event in my Grandmother’s youth. Now she lives in a self imposed prison with bars and locks on the doors and windows and in fear for her life too much of the time. There were no special prisons back then. No intervention programs. No need for millions to be spent on ineffective rehabilitation schemes. The difference was that simple human decency was generally abroad. The Progressives have destroyed that world, and an amoral and crime ridden society is the outcome.
Getting crime under control is a lengthy project that will not seriously begin until we acknowledge the influence of the Progressive political school and begin to turn away from it and begin the long trek back to out Christian Conservative roots. In the meantime, until that turnabout occurs, all the state can do is lock the habitual and violent criminals away from the rest of society.
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Completely agree. The ‘fatherless family’ experiment that’s taken place over the past 20 years or so, where single motherhood has been incentivised by those who hate and seek to destroy the traditional family, has been an utter and abject failure.
Turning away from the traditional family, turning stupid young men into sperm-donors and a cash-for-babies scheme for silly young girls is where many of society’s problems begin. It is only when society starts turning back to the traditional Father-Mother-Children family unit that the wounds will start to be healed.
Until that time, we can continue the breakdown of our society through the cuddle-a-crim mentality that pervades the political, judicial and ‘media’ industries, or we can start locking the scum away for longer and longer.
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There was a tongue in cheek post by Oswald Bastable recently, when he said he should send the elderly to prison to recieve fine dinners, excellent entertainment, clean sheets and someone checking on them every 20 minutes and the crooks to rest homes to go ignored and unfed in flithy, empty rooms for days of end…
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I like reading Os’ blog and his comments here and elsewhere. He has a way of cutting through the bullshit and I’m often left just nodding my head in agreement.
That particular comment is sad because it is completely true.
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The graph shows a lift off in the 70’s – at the same time that the welfare state started increasing greatly; that larger number of Samoans, Tongans and Maori started arriving in the cities. Keynesian ideas that lead to “Fortress New Zealand” need to be added to the mix. ~ It is unlikely that we would have had so many Pacific islanders but for the economic idiocy
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We don’t just have too many criminals, we have too many laws and politicians who think that any problem can be legislated away. I’d wager that cutting the numbers of laws, politicians, government programmes and agencies, bureaucrats, and the government budget (local and national) by 50%, would result in a similar reduction in crime and criminals.
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