"Throw Away the Key" Ideology Takes a Hit in the US

Senate Passes Criminal Justice Reform Bill

Sean Moran
Breitbart News

The Senate passed the First Step Act on Tuesday night in a win for the White House, especially senior adviser Jared Kushner, as well as many Republicans and Democrats.   The Senate passed the First Step Act on Tuesday, 87-12, featuring massive bipartisan appeal for the legislation. The Senate will then move to the House, which may take up the legislation sometime this week. Speaker Paul Ryan has promised to reconcile the two bills in Congress’s lame duck session.

The House overwhelmingly passed the First Step Act in May, although the legislation faced hurdles from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AK), and John Kennedy (R-LA). Some allies of the White House were not on board with the bill.  The divisive issue split Trump’s team as Sens. Cotton and Kennedy fought the legislation but lost in the end. The wide margin made it difficult for senators such as Cotton and Kennedy to fight.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has served as one of the champions for criminal justice reform for many years and cheered the bill’s passage through the Senate.

Sen. Paul said in a statement on Tuesday:

Braying Donkeys

Some Reporters and Academics Are In Wonderland

Here is how inane some in the media have become when it comes to crime and punishment.

A lack of evidence jailing people longer puts them or anyone off committing crime makes it difficult to use deterrence as a reason to hand out long prison sentences, a High Court judge has said.  Justice Matthew Palmer told lawyers ahead of sentencing he wanted them to come to court with evidence longer sentences actually had the deterrent effect the law told him to consider.

Days later, defence lawyers came with research showing it didn't work.  The Crown turned up with nothing.  The sentencing notes of Justice Palmer reflect concern around the lack of evidence in an area which the Sentencing Act 2002 says should be considered when judges consider how long to send people to jail.  [NZ Herald]

This is how the story was played up ("framed")  by David Fisher, Herald reporter.  However, in the small print, the matter was quite different.

Naive Leftist Politicians

Crime and Punishment

The new leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is Simon Bridges.  He has been moving around New Zealand introducing himself to the country.  As part of "the tour" he visited his old secondary school, Rutherford College.

Here are some excerpts from his speech.

Because I will be asking for your vote in 2020, I believe you have the right to know who I am. You should know what drives me and what I stand for.  I grew up a Westie – one with a blended background.  My mum is Pakeha and Dad is Māori.  We lived near enough to here that I walked to school. As a family, we weren’t well off, but we never went without.  I am the youngest of six children. . . .  

Growing up, my parents instilled in me a strong sense of right and wrong.  Dad was a Baptist minister at the church around the corner from here, so as well as being a supportive family we were taught the value of serving the community.  . . .

But even those who have tough childhoods do not need to be defined or limited by that. All of us have the ability to better ourselves, and improve our lot in life.  That belief is part of what drew me to the National Party.  I am ambitious for New Zealanders.  I back New Zealanders to succeed on their own two feet.  I back enterprise, and I think that people who take a risk and do well, and those who work hard, and who contribute to their communities, should be celebrated.  I also have a fundamental belief in personal responsibility. You can take pride in doing well, but you should take responsibility if you do harm.

As I said, I studied law. First, in Auckland, then at Oxford University, in England. . . .  My career in the law led me to become a Crown prosecutor.  I was responsible for making the case to a judge or jury in court that someone was guilty and should go to jail.  Over time, I was in charge of hundreds of trials, sometimes dealing with the worst things one person can do to another.

Assaults, rapes and murders.  It was a role of huge contrasts. Many days I was depressed by the dark side of human behaviour.  But other times I was inspired by the resilience of victims, and sometimes by previous offenders who were gradually putting their lives back together.  One particular case will be with me forever.

Letter From the UK (About Prisons)

Fifty Years of 'Enlightened' Jails

Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail Australia

Modern politicians don’t like taking responsibility for anything difficult. They hate the idea that you sometimes have to punish people. That’s understandable. Locking people up and making them work hard and do as they’re told isn’t very nice.

But if you can’t bear the burden, then don’t seek paid public office. These nasty tasks are the most basic duty of the State. If it won’t protect us from the wicked, then we might as well wind it up.
We have disarmed in the face of danger. Until about 50 years ago, the stated aim of prisons was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’. Under a clear criminal code, most crooks and most louts were scared of prison and tried not to go there. It wasn’t some savage place of torture and beatings.

By world standards our prisons were very civilised. But they were austere, disciplined and under the control of the authorities.

State Terrorism

Cruel and Unjust Punishment

With the execution of the Bali Nine in Indonesia the death penalty has come back into the frame.  According to Wikipedia, Indonesia maintains the ultimate judicial sanction for nineteen offences:

• Attempt with intent to deprive the President or Vice-President of his or her life or liberty or to render him or her unfit to govern (Indonesian Criminal Code (Kitab UU Hukum Pidana – KUHP) Art. 104)
• Aiding or protecting Indonesia’s enemies at war (KUHP Art. 123 & 124)
• Fraud in delivery of military materials in time of war (KUHP Art. 127)
• Killing the head of state of a friendly state (KUHP Art. 140)
• Premeditated murder (KUHP Art. 340)
• Robbery or theft resulting in grave injury or death (KUHP Art. 365)
• Piracy resulting in death (KUHP Art. 444)
• Instigating or inciting rebellion or riot against a state defense company during times of war (KUHP)
• Extortion with violence (KUHP)
• Possession and misuse of firearm and/or other explosive (Emergency Law No. 12/1951)
• Criminal acts during air flights or against aviation infrastructure (Law No. 4/1976)
• Production, transit, import and possession of psychotropic drugs (Law No. 5/1997 on Psychotropic Drugs)
• Production, transit, import and possession of narcotics (Law No. 22/1997 on Narcotics)
• Corruption under “certain circumstances,” including repeat offenders and corruption committed during times of national emergency/disaster (Law No. 31/1999 on Corruption)
• Gross violations of human rights, including genocide and crimes against humanity (Law No. 26/2000 on Human Rights Courts)
• Acts of terrorism (Law No. 15/2003 on Combating Criminal Acts of Terrorism)

However, in actuality only murder and drug trafficking have resulted in the ultimate penalty being handed out.  But more sinister is the fact that the death penalty has been applied in Indonesia extremely rarely (whether for murder or drug trafficking) until this year (2015), where fourteen people have been executed for drug trafficking thus far.

It seems as though a political campaign is underway in Indonesia.

Systemic Or Exceptional Injustice?

Bad Faith Forensics

There are few things more evil than when a judicial system preys upon the weak and the vulnerable.  The Guardian reviews the case of one man who has been facing execution in Alabama for the past 28 years.  He has just been released because wrongful conviction.

It is inevitable that mistakes in the justice system occur--hopefully rarely.  It is to be expected that such mistakes may be made in the very best of good faith--that is, without malice, intent, or a deliberate attempt to "fit" or frame the accused.  When such has not been the case and wrong convictions have resulted from an  accused not being able to fund an adequate defence, the very system becomes complicit in wickedness. When the state seeks conviction on the grounds of shonky, slip-shod forensic evidence, the sin and crime of bearing false-witness is almost inevitable.

Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, spent half his life on Alabama’s death row, sentenced to die for two 1985 murders that for decades he insisted he did not commit.  Over 28 years, the outside world changed while Hinton spent his days largely in a 5ft by 8ft prison cell. Children grew up. His mother died. His hair turned gray. Inmates he knew were escorted off to the electric chair or the lethal-injection gurney.

He was set free on Friday after new ballistics tests contradicted the only evidence – an analysis of crime-scene bullets – that connected Hinton to the slayings.  As he left the jail, Hinton said he would pray for the victims’ families as he has done for the past 30 years. They have suffered a “miscarriage of justice” as well, he said. He had less kind words for those involved in his conviction.  “When you think you are high and mighty and you are above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody. But I got news for them, everybody who played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God,” Hinton said.

Monarchical Tyranny Redivivus

Rotting Sores

George Will is a seasoned, right-of-centre columnist in the United States.  He penned an open letter to Loretta Lynch, who is the nominee for US Attorney General.  She is soon to be examined by the Senate.

In Will's letter, he raises a number of disturbing features of the US judicial system--features which appal advocates and commentators on both left and right. 

Senate confirmation hearings put nominees on notice that, as a Michigan state legislator reportedly once said, “I’m watching everything you do with a fine-toothed comb.” Loretta Lynch, a talented lawyer and seasoned U.S. attorney, should be confirmed as attorney general. Her hearing, however, should not be perfunctory.

Questions like the following would highlight some festering problems:

Next year is the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which began the slow, serpentine progress to our modern panoply of rights, including those of persons accused of serious crimes. Today, however, regarding sexual misconduct on campuses, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights uses the threat of withdrawing federal funding to coerce colleges and universities into jettisoning crucial defendants’ protections when adjudicating, in improvised tribunals, accusations of sexual assault. Presumption of innocence? The new presumption is that accusations are valid until disproved. The right to confront one’s accuser? No, it would be traumatizing to the “survivor” (note the prejudgment). Proof beyond a reasonable doubt? Now a mere “preponderance of the evidence” will suffice. Are you comfortable with this traducing of due process?

The presumption of innocence and the need to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt are fundamental to our Anglo-Saxon systems of justice.

Prisoners and the Vote

Sensible Sentencing

A career criminal and (now) jail-house lawyer is taking a case to the High Court attempting to overturn legislation which denies prisoners the vote.  The case has been inspired by the European Court of Human Rights which has infamously ruled that denial of suffrage to prisoners violates their human rights.  New Zealand's own Bill of Rights--a piece of statutory law--declares voting to be a, you guessed it, human right.

The argument being made amounts to question-begging of the highest order.  Point One: denial of suffrage to prisoners is a prima facie violation of the NZ Human Rights Act.  Point Two: denial of suffrage is cruel and unusual punishment, since it does not contribute in any meaningful way to the rehabilitation of prisoners. Point Three: the European Court of Human Rights ruling is a fantastic precedent, which has all sorts of implications for antediluvians in the Antipodes.

The question begged is this: does incarceration represent any removal or diminution or denial of any human rights--declared and ostensibly protected in the NZ Human Rights Act--at all?  One would imagine so.  Being told when to rise, when to comply with "lights out", when to eat, what to wear, where to go, where not to go, and how to conduct oneself at all times, with retributive punishment for non-compliance, violates just about every freedom right imaginable.  So, if the argument that denial of suffrage for prisoners amounts to a breach of the NZ Human Rights Act is deemed correct, all incarceration of convicted criminals must also breach that Act. But if incarceration of prisoners in this country does not breach the NZ Human Rights Act, then neither can withdrawing suffrage from them. 

We are aware that some folk philosophically oppose retributive punishment of any kind for criminals.

Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Criminality, Part I

 Crime Inc. in New Zealand

Over the next little while we will be publishing some posts interacting with a book about crime and punishment in New Zealand, by David Fraser.  [Badlands--NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa: Howling at the Moon Publishing Ltd, 2011.)]  The book is excellent in places, naive and one-dimensional in others.  But it begs some very important questions which need to be debated and discussed.

Firstly, a brief bio of the author, Britain David Fraser.  He has long experience in the UK penal system, having worked for the National Probation Service (and its pre-cursors) for 26 years.  He has worked for the Criminal Intelligence Analyst with the National Criminal Intelligence Service.  Thus, the author is no lightweight in these matters.  He has been in New Zealand on a national speaking tour as a guest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust--hence his interest in New Zealand as a comparison and contrast with his researches in crime and punishment in the UK.

The first section of the book seeks to establish a very important premise to the whole argument:

Public Sector Prejudice

Prisons and Glass Houses

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones--at least that's what we were gravely told whilst  learning social manners.  When we grew up we also learned that conflicts of interest are usually nefarious unless they are disclosed.  Both adages are relevant in the following case.

New Zealand has finally introduced private management contracts for some selected prisons.  The knee jerk reaction from hide bound statists (whose numbers are legion in this country) has been swift, predictable, simplistic and naive.

Three Strikes Law at Work

Inherently Just

We have had our own New Zealand version of the "Three Strikes" law on our statute books for six months. The Police and Corrections Minister, Judith Collins reports that 132 offenders have been sentenced under this new law in that time.

We are very supportive of the NZ version of the "three strikes" approach to sentencing. It will no doubt require some tweaks from time to time. But we believe that this is something we have got basically right. It is a carefully graduated statute, avoiding the unpalatable injustices of "three strikes" laws when they were originally introduced overseas.

The Sentencing and Parole Reform Act imposes a graduated scale of harsher penalties for repeat criminals who are convicted of one of 40 violent or sexual offences. An offender receives a normal sentence and a warning for strike one, a sentence without parole for strike two, and the maximum sentence for that offence, without parole, for strike three.

There will be plenty of people in the "commentariate" who will continue to question this law. Is it working? Are criminals being deterred? No doubt every time someone reaches "strike three" and gets the maximum non-parole sentence it will be an occasion to opine that the law is "not working". This is because New Zealand, like most Western countries, remains paralyzed in a hopeless confusion over crime and punishment. Given that all Western countries to a greater or lesser extent believe that government has a redemptive function and responsibility, the existence of even one criminal and the commission of just one crime would be seen as a failure of the state and of society. In such a world-view, punishment for crime is not an option. That is why in New Zealand, our prison system is called the "Department of Corrections", underscoring its conception as a redemptive, saving institution.

Thus, the "three strikes" law will always be assessed as to whether it is believed to be effective in reducing crime. But this is a nonsense. Not only is it grounded in a false ideology, but how would you ever tell? No doubt criminologists and "commentariate" members will routinely trot out things such as "Our research tells us that 'three strikes' has not worked to reduce crime in New Zealand," in the future.

But the very pronouncement conveys the folly of such spurious research. No doubt the causes of crime are manifold, various, and complex. No doubt they also change over time. Unless research can screen out all the multi-variate factors and test "three strikes" as an isolated factor, the research will be worthless. But, it will get done, and it will be published, and it will be used to argue that "three strikes" has failed. How do we know this?

One reason is ideological: the very suggestion of "punishment" with respect to crime is an offense to those who believe in the redemptive powers of the state--and that is the vast majority in our country. "Three strikes" will gnaw at the ideological vitals of the body politic. The second reason such spurious research will be done and will be employed is because such shonky research is done all the time. Multi-variate causes are ignored routinely in much "social science" statistical research because they prevent hard conclusions being drawn, which, in turn, precludes headlines, which in its turn makes it more difficult to get funding--and so on. Multi-variate causes make conclusions die the death of a thousand qualifications, so things "work better" if they are just ignored, being quietly put to the side.

We have no interest in whether "three strikes" laws reduce crime. The reason, however, we believe "three strikes" is the right approach is because of the inherent justice involved. If two people are in the dock, one convicted of aggravated robbery as a first offence, the second as a third offence the guilt of the repeat offender is greater; therefore the punishment must be greater. Punishment does not atone for crime. It is retributive. It deals out what the criminal deserves. Restitution atones--making up and good, restoring the victim. Punishment does not. Therefore, for successive crimes the guilt of former crimes continues and is heaped up.

"Three strikes" sentencing policies are inherently just. Whether they reduce crime or not is irrelevant.

Mixed Emotions are the Required Response

Clayton Weatherston

The blogs have been sizzling and the airwaves have been reverberating over the Weatherston trial and verdict. There have been many aspects commented upon. The issue of provocation as a defence has been prominent.

The Government's signal that it will remove it as a defence (at the recommendation of the Law Commission) is troubling. It is a sound adage that extreme cases do not make a solid foundation for good law. Madeleine offers some thoughtful criticism of this move--although the Law Commission assures us that provoking circumstances can be accommodated in the current sentencing flexibility available to judges.

Questions have been raised about the mental state and wellbeing of Weatherston. Macdoctor argues that the case illustrates the need for more use of forensic psychiatric facilities. Zen, in his inimitable style, had extended the justification of provocation to all kinds of quixotic public behaviour--a post which we found--well--provoking. Zen gravely informs us that the defence of provocation should be referred to as "Clayton's defence".

Moving from the satirical we have also been confronted with outpourings of invective, disgust, and vituperation against Weatherston from many quarters. Today the newspapers are carrying stories of crims within prison putting a bounty on Weatherston's head; some are calling that fair justice.

Still others have expressed repugnance at the idea of retributive punishment and vengeance within the penal system--particularly after the recent speech by the Chief Justice questioning the utility and effectiveness of longer prison sentences. And so it goes on.

There are a few issues which go to the heart of the prevailing religion in any society. The dominant theory of the day of crime and punishment is one of them. Here you will find on display society's systems of ethics, its register of what it considers extreme sins, and its principles of justice, crime, and punishment. In the court house and what is subsequently inflicted upon the person of the convicted criminal you will find religious belief writ large.

It is also an area where you will find some of the starkest contrasts between the Christian faith and Unbelief. In the first place, Jerusalem resiles from invective, disgust and vituperation against the person of the criminal. Believers are pervaded with a deep sense of personal and corporate depravity which sees every guilty criminal as a potential mirror. The story is told of the Puritan watching someone being marched to the gallows who bowed his head and said, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." Believers know that they can never say (at least truthfully) that they are so good that there are some crimes and despicable acts they could and would never, ever commit. Given the "right" circumstances and enticements every Christian knows that they would be capable of any and every bad thing--at least if they are walking in the light.

Moreover, Christians know and believe that all humans bear the image of God Himself--and therefore even the worst criminals must be treated with appropriate respect condign to their being an image bearer. Therefore, outpourings of contempt, vituperation, and hatred are inappropriate and unacceptable.

Furthermore, Jerusalem knows and understands that vengeance upon evildoers has been claimed by God as His exclusive preserve. Society is expressly prohibited from taking vengeance upon criminals. "Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'" (Romans 12: 19) This undergirds all Christian justice, all Christian penology.

Vengeance will be taken, both in the life and the one to come, but it has been laid down for us that it is a realm exclusively reserved by God. This means that all justice, courts, decisions, and policy toward criminals is seen not as elements of public policy, but first and foremost as divine acts. Within Jerusalem, when a criminal is judged and punished in the manner commanded by God Himself, it is seen as a divine action not the will, act, or behest of the creature. In matters of crime and punishment, we obey; we do not command.

Further, for Christians capital punishment and the death penalty as the most extreme and final punishment in this life is accepted and submitted to because God, to Whom alone belongs vengeance and retribution, has stipulated it, and laid it down.

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behaviour, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, and avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil.
(Romans 13: 3,4)

Finally, Jerusalem knows that there is an important element of prevention which plays out when the system of crime and punishment is biblically grounded and understood to be the preserve of God Himself. Part of the actual effect of righteous justice is to lead people to fear to do wrong. Evil acts have consequences that are fearful.

We are thankful that we have a justice system in New Zealand that works, albeit imperfectly, inconsistently, and in part--despite it being terribly flawed. We are thankful that crimes such as murder are still regarded as criminal acts and criminals receive retribution and punishment, at least in some degree. However, our gratitude is always tinged with sadness and fear--lest we too fall into evil.

We cannot endorse in any sense whatsoever the idea that a criminal may deservedly suffer harm at the hands of other criminals in our prison system. The moment we do is the moment we, mere creatures, have claimed vengeance for ourselves. At that moment the foundations of justice itself have gone.

Crime and Punishment III

Making Prisons Fair and Just

An oft-heard argument for longer prison sentences is the need to protect the public. The idea is that violent criminals will continue to prey upon others so the only way to protect the innocent is to lock violent criminals up forcibly separating them from their fellow man.

This argument for the prison system is intriguing insofar as it tacitly admits that rehabilitation in prisons does not occur--or that there are some persons that are virtually irremediable. Apparently the Corrections Department is not very good at that which its name implies.

We remain deeply skeptical over the ability and competence of prison to rehabilitate or correct. How one could be locked up with a college of criminals and by virtue of that fact be rehabilitated strains credulity beyond the breaking point. It is a stupid idea. But, more importantly, we do not like the "protect the public" approach, because it is fundamentally unjust. It necessarily involves punishment because of what might one do in the future, not because of what one has actually done--which seems inimical to even basic rudiments of justice.

Better not to introduce considerations of protection of society against a supposed threat which may be hypothetically carried out some time in the future.

Rather, as we have argued, the only just principle for prisons is to run them as institutions of involuntary slavery where the slaves have the opportunity to work to pay their restitution debts. Now, as we have argued, there will always been some proportion of the prison population who are recalcitrant and who refuse to work. We would expect that the more violent, lawless inmate is likely to be overly represented in this proportion.

It will fall out that these inmates stay permanently in prison because their restitution debts mount to the point where they could not pay them back in their lifetimes. They will likely die in prison. So be it. Moreover, it is also inevitable that capital crimes such as rape or murder would attract the highest and largest restitution penalties, requiring long years of work (and, therefore, incarceration) to pay off the debt. A by product of this would be protection to society at large--but this would be achieved without perverting the fundamental principles of justice.

We have argued that prisons would make more sense if they were completely structured around the fundamental principle of justice that the criminal needs to restitute those he has harmed. This would transform virtually the entire prison system into one of incarcerated employment. Everything would be orientated to achieving this end. But this would not be the kind of slavery where prisoners have no choices, rights, obligations or responsibilities. Remember, the enslaved work regime is not for punishment, but to enable payment to victims.

In this approach, prisoners would be required to compete for the jobs available. They would apply for them, be interviewed, appointed etc. They would not be forced to do a job they did not choose to do. (Once again, if they did not work, they would move into close supervision regimes, and their restitution debt would start to increase rapidly as the full cost of prison "room and board" were applied to their accounts.)

They would have the right of resignation from a job at any time. They would also be subject to firing if they did not perform up to specification. Prisoners would also have a right to change prisons, if they applied and were successful in being appointed to a work position in another prison. Naturally, the most popular prisons would be those that provided the best work opportunities. Moreover, those prisons which were keeping costs down, so that less was taken out of weekly wages for “room and board” would also be more popular.

Incidentally, under this model there is no reason why a prisoner could not choose which prison to be sent to in the first place. Since all the commercial operations run within prisons would be competing for labour they would be constrained to offer the best terms and conditions of employment possible. Once again--prison on this model would not be for purposes of punishment but for bonded servitude until restitution debts were paid. So, it would make sense for prisons to compete to attract prisoners, and for prisoners to have the right of choice. (Of course, if their preferences could not be satisfied, the courts would assign them to a particular prison.)

Prisons would be adjudged as relatively more or less successful not just in penal terms such as preventing escapes and maintaining social order (though these are important measures) but also in terms of how many prisoners were able to work off their restitution debts and win release. This would help give an incentive to prison administrations to ensure that sustainable, productive, and lucrative employment opportunities were available to those in their charge.

We would expect that some prisons would focus and concentrate upon particular industries or lines of commerce (much of which may be sub-contracted to private firms which would run businesses within the prisons). This would suit some prisoners and not others—depending on their levels of skills and training. Some prison businesses would pay more, depending upon the commercial rates for work and labour operating in their particular industry.

At the same time, a prisoner at any time could leave prison, provided someone in the marketplace or community were prepared to pay his outstanding restitution debt, and the prisoner's debt-obligation were able to be transferred to the benefactor. This would help keep all rates of remuneration in prison set to market levels. If a business run within a prison were paying sub-market rates for skilled labour, outside competitor firms could compete its trained staff away, by paying their restitution bonds.

Moreover, there would be no objections or barriers to prisoners becoming engaged in business activities outside the prison (provided they were lawful) by means of cell-phones, the internet, or other media. The earnings would need to be accounted for, administration of bank accounts be done by trustees, and appropriate payments made to reduce their restitution debt. Such constructive behaviour would be encouraged. The sooner the prisoner-slave paid off his restitution debt, the sooner he could be released. Neither would there be any barriers to prisoners employing other prisoners, provided all arrangements were formally contracted and properly administrated.

No actual money should ever be available in prisons! We would also expect that some incarcerated criminals would seek to exploit the system. There would likely be attempts to sabotage workplaces, conspiracies to ensure that gang members got the favoured jobs in the favoured prisons, etc. However, whilst this would require effective policing, there would be a number of factors that would militate against such influences. Since it would be up to each commercial enterprise which prisoners they hired, any gang or conspiratorial group would risk being black-listed. This would mean that all their associates would likely be refused jobs, thereby effectively lengthening sentences by the day. The knowledge that association with a gang would likely result in unemployability, leading to a lifetime in prison would be a powerful disincentive to associate with any group that was found undermining or working against the system.

Moreover, employers would have the right to fire unco-operative or dilatory prison workers. That would be entered on to a prisoners employment record. The likelihood of his finding a replacement job would thereby be diminished. The threat of a lifetime in prison would loom large at all times. But in most cases whether this threat came to pass or not would depend upon the attitude and application of the prisoner. In other words, his destiny would be largely in his own hands.

As soon as a prisoner had paid his restitution debt he would be freed from incarceration or involuntary slavery. The sooner he paid it, the sooner his prison sentence would end. There would be no prison terms, nor parole. Both would be irrelevant. The endless and tedious arguments about stricter prison sentences, longer prison sentences, earlier parole, home detentions and the like would all be redundant. Every day a prisoner worked he would know that this term was being shortened.

To reinforce this reality, every fortnight a prisoner would receive a payslip, or statement of outstanding debt. This would contain the summary of his offences and crimes, the amount of the original restitution debt, a statement of how much had been worked off to date, the amount outstanding, and the earnings for the past two weeks. This would serve constantly to remind prisoners of why they were currently enslaved, and what they needed to do to remove the yoke of slavery from off their necks. One imagines that they would have plenty of opportunity to think about their criminal acts and the damage they did to innocent people.

The benefits of this approach to crime and punishment, which derive from the Mosaic legal code, would be far reaching.

Gone would be the endless wrangles over length of sentences, parole terms, community sentencing, home detention, prison management, bungles at the Corrections Department, community safety, and so forth. There would be one strictly neutral and disinterested principle determining the length of a sentence: it would last as short or as long as it took to pay back the restitution debt.

The State and the court system also would have one overriding interest or objective in dealing with the criminal: everything would be aligned to ensure that the victim was justly restituted. The objective would be neither to make it hard nor easy for the criminal in prison. Rather, the focus of prison policy would be to provide an environment where every willing prisoner could earn a sustainable income to pay off their restitution debt so they could be released from penal enslavement as soon as possible. Moreover, every working prisoner would be making a meaningful contribution to the upkeep and running of the prison. The cost to the taxpayer of running prisons would be reduced substantially.

The successful rehabilitation of the criminal into the community once released from prison would be far more likely under this method. The criminal would be a criminal no longer: he would have completely paid off his debts to those he had wronged. He would bear the honour of having done the honourable thing—somewhat akin to a bankrupt who subsequently paid back all he owed to his creditors. Moreover, it is likely that his time in prison would have helped him gain marketable skills and work disciplines that would be useful on the outside.

The wider family of every prisoner could make meaningful contributions to seeing their family member get out of restitution debt. Every dollar they contributed would see the sentence shortened. The more the wider community were to contribute, the more the accountability when the prisoner was released. The more contributions to victim restitution an extended family could make, the more they would retain their honour and help remove the shame of a family member who committed crimes.

Moreover, there would be no need to debate “three strikes” sentencing policies. Each crime would be treated justly on its “merits” as it were, and sentencing would be focused upon restitution. As argued above, the more serious crimes would like take decades to pay off.

Finally, those who want to extend mercy, forgiveness and compassion to prisoners would have ample opportunity. Charities and individuals, if they chose, could assist in the repaying of restitution debts. They would then bear the responsibility—to a significant extent—of the course and career of the prisoner whose debt had paid and who had been released from prison.

Of course this penology would not result in every problem being overcome. There will always be problems, sins, and crimes in our fallen world. There would still be recidivism, although we believe at far lower rates. There would still be horrific crimes, which would attract restitution debts so vast that they would be unlikely to be repaid even in several lifetimes. There would always be recalcitrant prisoners who would elect to die in prison. The pernicious influence of criminal gangs in the prisons would not go away. At least not initially, although we suspect that their influence and control of prisons would likely weaken over time.

But underneath everything, in applying these principles, would be the overarching and undergirding principle of justice. No longer “you did the crime, now do the time” which bears no relation to justice at all apart from the element of retribution. The “time” as it is currently understood is a complete non-sequitur to the crime. Everybody instinctively understands that—which is why there is such disquiet over modern western penal systems. Moreover, even when the State levies fines upon criminals it is an unjust non-sequitur. How on earth does paying money to the state constitute a just punishment for damage done to a victim of crime?

But if the slogan were changed to: “you did the crime, now make it up to those you damaged” it is intrinsically much more just. A judicial and penal system built around this principle, and relentlessly and consistently structured so as to see that it is carried out, would be overtly and demonstrably more just that the current system.

“You dealt the dirt, now heal the hurt” has a far more righteous ring to it. That in a nutshell is the Christian philosophy of crime and punishment. That would revive and revolutionise the modern prison system, creating something far better.

But how likely is this approach to gain currency in our modern world? Not at all. Until a society knows and believes that all sin, including all criminal acts, will receive an exacting and full and just retributive punishment in the world to come it will not be able to relinquish its supposed right to execute vengeance in this life. Thus, in our modern western pagan world, restitution to victims will remain unimportant and inconsequential. Retributive punishment will remain a major driver of justice, along with totally contradictory principles such as the belief that sin is environmentally caused and that ultimately the criminal is a victim of society, not an evildoer.

These warring principles will consign the institutions of justice and the prison system to a hopeless Babel of ineffectual confusion and persistent systematic injustice. The practice of justice and the treatment of criminals is one of the places where the dominant religion of every society is on display. The fruits of the idolatry of Autonomous Man are not pleasant to behold.

Crime and Punishment, Part II

Justice is A Matter of Restitution, Not Punishment or Correction

We have argued that the modern Athenian system of justice is anything but systematic. It is riddled with inconsistencies, non sequiturs, blind alleys, irrationality, and--well, to be blunt--stupidity. One fundamental cause of this is that society remains confused over what the purpose is of the prison system. Modern western societies, including New Zealand, cannot decide whether prisons are for punishment, rehabilitation, correction, penitence, or for protection of the community. The best that our hopelessly confused systems of justice can come up with is "all of the above" which results in a completely confused mess of programmes and policies in the courts and in the prison "system" (one hesitates to employ a term which implies order and structure.)

We have also argued that prisons are our modern form of institutionalised slavery. Whilst none dare call it that--the word is unmentionable in polite society--nevertheless the entire prison system is nothing more than a form of slavery, where right of ownership of an individual is asserted by the State. But there is one profound difference between our modern form of slavery and that found in every other culture and time: our slaves do not work! They are kept as slaves, but forbidden to work. This makes it abundantly clear that the modern prison system had to have been invented by the Irish.

For Jerusalem, that Christian City, when it comes to crime and punishment there is one predominant objective which should override all others, and to which all other objectives should be subordinate: victims of crime should be restituted by the criminal. That is the fundamental debt criminals owe. Everything else should be bent toward achieving this end. If there are to be prisons, they should exist to offer those imprisoned a structured opportunity to restitute those whom they have harmed. On this principle, the prison is an institution enabling disciplined, structured restitution of victims (not punishment, correction, penitence, rehabilitation of criminals, or whatever else might be the flavour of the month.)

Ironically, (and not surprisingly, given the perverted nature of Unbelief) restitution of victims is the one objective overlooked completely in the sentencing of criminals in our pagan justice system. Yes, we know that from time to time the State has bursts of enthusiasm about the idea, but it remains little more than an optional extra to the modern criminology. Yet, if it were properly instituted into our system of punishment it would make a whole lot more sense. Moreover, it would make the whole modern system of crime and punishment more overtly and intrinsically a system of justice. It would do this because it would institutionalise the principle of the criminal being required to put right those whom he has wronged.

In order for this to work properly, however, and result in a thorough reform and rehabilitation of the prison system there are some crucial aspects which must be part of the package—without which, the whole construct would collapse into yet another incarceration failure. We cannot emphasize this enough. There is little to be gained (and much to be lost) if restitution were to be added as one more objective of prison administration. This would only add one more confusion to bedlam.

Any reform, in order to be reform, must only be undertaken if it reorganises the entire prison and justice system around this one dominant objective: restitution of victims. This means society must relinquish its desire for vengeance, or its pretensions about redemption, correction, or rehabilitation. These are nothing more than humanistic idolatries where man is vainly asserting the prerogatives of the Living God.

Let us trace out how this might work, in the courts and in the prisons.

First and most important is the principle that the debt a criminal owes is not to society at large, but to his victims—to those he has harmed and hurt by his actions. (The idea that the debt is to society at large is just another manifestation of socialism asserting the communal, that is state ownership of everything.) According to the Christian view of justice in this world, if a criminal adequately restitutes his victims the State has no further claims upon him, and continuing enslavement in a prison is unjust.

To highlight this principle, consider the following case. A thief steals a car and writes it off. In the process he smashes into another car and hospitalises an innocent. At court, the judge orders restitution to be made to the owners of the two cars. The criminal must provide funds to purchase replacement vehicles, plus additional compensation for hurt, inconvenience, and the imposition of having to go without a car. In addition, the judge orders that an appropriate lump sum be paid over to the hospitalised victim to cover all medical expenses, plus additional funds to compensate for loss of earnings, hurt to the family, ongoing medical costs, any temporary or permanent impairment, etc. (The calculation of monetary compensation for hurt suffered has a long and honoured tradition in western jurisprudence. It also is a fundamental construct in biblical justice.)

Let us estimate that the total restitution ordered by the court would amount to $350,000. In addition, the criminal would be charged from time and attendance by the police, together with court costs. It turns out, however, that the thief has a wealthy uncle who agrees to pay over the restitution money. The thief agrees to accept the payment of his obligation, and the funds are duly paid over to the victims. At that point, the State has no further interest in or claim upon the criminal (apart from the police and court costs, which would be part of the restitution debt). The debt has been paid. Justice has been done.

But, we hear you say, the criminal has paid no price. He has not been punished. Possibly. But the victims have been restituted and that is the predominant, if not the only, interest which the State has in the matter. Further retribution to the thief belongs to God, not to human courts.

Now, we should not imagine that the thief is off scot free. In the ordinary patterns of human social interaction, we would expect that in most cases the family, led by the generous uncle, will demand a great deal of the thief in return.

This leads us to the second vital principle: where a relative or person of interest offers to restitute victims on behalf of a criminal, the criminal must be formally indicted as being in debt to his benefactor or kinsman-redeemer. The State must recognize that the kinsman-redeemer has a property right in his relative or the one he has redeemed, until the debt is paid off or back. This debt would be able to be cancelled at any time at the discretion of the kinsman-redeemer up to a period of so many years, nominated by the benefactor. After that time, the debt would be automatically canceled. These terms and conditions would be negotiated and agreed to by both the kinsman-redeemer and the redeemed—and would subsequently be recorded and ratified by the Court. Prior to that time, the kinsman redeemer, at any time, could demand payment of the debt. If the criminal were unable to pay the amount outstanding, the State would pay the remainder to the kinsman-redeemer, and the thief would be sent, or recalled, to prison until the balance outstanding were paid to the State.

This model of penology would result in large numbers of people being kept out of the prison system in the first place. This in itself would have a significant benefit. Everybody knows that the current prison system apparently succeeds in just one thing: it is one of the most sophisticated and powerful schools of crime and criminality ever devised by man. People who do stupid and thoughtless acts in their youth are often transformed into career criminals though their first experiences in the modern pagan prison system. Our approach would provide the opportunity to avoid prison altogether.

The third principle is that if a criminal were unable to pay restitution, and no-one was prepared to act as kinsman-redeemer, the State would pay over the restitution to the victims and consign the criminal to prison until he has worked off his restitution debt. Only then would the criminal be viewed as having a debt to society at large, since his restitution money would have been paid by society at large. There would be no fixed term or judicial term to the prison sentence. The criminal would stay in prison as long as it took to pay back the debt. If he failed to pay back the debt, he would never get out of prison--thus, effectively being consigned to prison for the term of his natural life.

Fourthly, it follows that prisons must be places of work where prisoners can earn income to pay off their restitution debts. This would remove the folly of having slaves who are not allowed to work. As we have said there would be no fixed term of sentence. The term would be set by however long it takes to pay back the restitution debt. (Generally, the more serious the crime, the longer it would take to pay it back because the amount of restitution would be greater. Therefore the period of incarceration for serious crimes would likely be longer. White collar criminals, with large numbers of victims, might never emerge from prison.) Kinsman-redeemers, or private benefactors, would be able to pay all or part of the amount outstanding at any time, to assist with the shortening or ending of the term of slavery (that is, working while in prison.) This would have the collateral benefit of enabling a wider family to contribute to the welfare of the prisoner in the most practical of ways and at the same time giving the family a significant incentive to do all they can to ensure that the prisoner would not re-offend.

Fifthly, there would be no compulsion within the prison system to work. Forcing people to work against their will only results in work that is unproductive and of a low standard. It also necessitates extensive and constant supervision. Rather, a fixed charge should be added to the restitution debt roughly equivalent to the costs incurred in keeping a criminal in prison. We are told that it costs roughly $70,000 per annum to keep a person incarcerated. This amount should be added to the restitution debt annually for a prisoner who refuses to work. Moreover, non-working prisoners would lose privileges, being kept in close confinement. The only way to regain the ordinary prison privileges would be to volunteer to work, make application for an available job, and be accepted. Once employed, they would immediately come out of close confinement. Some would continue to refuse and would thereby consign themselves to a life time of incarceration. So be it.

Sixthly, if a prisoner elected to work, we suggest that up to half his earnings would be deducted from his income to pay for his “board and expenses”, up to a certain maximum amount which would be the annual cost of keeping a prisoner incarcerated. The remainder would be applied to his outstanding restitution account. Thus, if a prisoner were earning more than $140,000 per annum in prison, he would never be charged more than $70,000 per annum for “board and expenses.” As an incentive, for the time a prisoner elected to work, and therefore for the time payments were being made out of his earnings to his “board and expenses” account, nothing more would be charged to him for his incarceration costs, even though fifty percent of his income might be far less than the actual cost of his keep.

We would expect that the prisoner would pay income tax on his earnings. This would be an indirect method of compensating the State for inflation eroding the value of the original restitution bond. It would also remove any distortions between a criminal working to pay of his restitution debt privately, as opposed to prison facilitated payment. It would also avoid the fundamental trap of giving prison enterprises an advantage over their competitors.

Seventh—and this is vital—the work done in prisons must be at real enterprises, doing real jobs, producing commercial goods and services, by businesses operating at and for profit in the open market place—and the prisoners must be paid at commercial market employment rates. The present system operating in prisons is self-defeating and stupid. Privileged prisoners can go on work schemes (often in the community): they are paid “pocket money” wages and have little or no financial incentive. Meanwhile private businesses find that their enterprises and firms are undercut and outcompeted by those firms employing cheap prison labour. It is a completely unsustainable and self-defeating model. It reflects the screwed up thinking of modern penology.

The overwhelming objective of current work schemes in prisons is rehabilitation (teaching work skills, meaningful activity, to enable prisoners to function into society). Because the focus is not on paying restitution debt, the incentive of working to earn so as to get ahead is removed, thereby removing most of the benefit of work in the first place.

Why else ought prisons exist? Every other purported objective set forth for prisons to accomplish they have miserably failed at--and the Western world has around three hundred years of experience at this now. We are such slow learners. Or maybe ignorance is invincible when it is blinded by humanist ideology.

But what about the argument that prisons at least protect the rest of the community by locking malefactors up and away? It turns out that this principle is also fundamentally unjust and cannot be used as a principle of just punishment. We will take this up in our next piece.

Crime and Punishment, Part I

The Splenetic Subject of Prisons

Prisons, crime and punishment are the current topics du jour. Firstly, we have the brouhaha over privately run prisons. For some it appears that the profit motive is sufficiently nasty and tacky that the idea that a business could make money from running a prison is distasteful. This criticism reminds one of the attitude amongst the upper classes of the Georgian period where they looked down their noses at people who were earning their keep through business enterprise. Being “in trade” was a snobbish insult. Trade! How disgusting.

Worse is the emotive corollary—that someone could actually make money from someone else's suffering (that is, criminals being punished) is beyond distaste. It gets very close to trafficking in human beings—that is, to a re-emergence of slavery. As soon as the "s" word comes in to play, emotions can run high.

Since criticism such as these are sufficiently extreme to have difficulty in gaining public traction, opponents of privately run prisons are forced to retreat to arguments about the relative cost versus benefits of private prisons compared to state run prisons. So the debate, complete with specious and deceptive use of data masquerading as "facts", has been going on now for some weeks. However, those who take the negative position are being embarrassed almost daily as the failings of the NZ Corrections Department and the shambolic and squalid state of our prisons comes to light. People are starting to think pragmatically on this issue: surely privately run prisons couldn't be worse than our current mess, could they?

Of course there are those who take the high moral ground (philosophically speaking). They want to advance the idea that punishing criminals is a role that ought to be exclusively reserved for the State. No-one else can or should undertake that duty. This neatly skirts the debates over profit or not, good outcomes or not, well run prisons or not. However such philosophical arguments fail dismally in that there is no underlying ground or principle on which they can be founded. In the end, the question is always begged, “Who says punishment of crime belongs exclusively to the State?” The absolute notion of the State solely being entitled to punish criminals has no place in the modern relativistic pagan world where “man is the measure of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

One of the main reasons modern society is so pathetic and fails so dismally in its penology is the fundamental and perpetual confusion over what should be done with criminals. The modern penal system is (at the same time) a regime of punishment, of rehabilitation, of correction, of reconditioning and retraining, of penitence, and of protection for the rest of society. These objectives are so diverse, so disparate and so contradictory that they constantly war against each other. This explains why such confusion exists over prisons and the prison system—and why none are satisfied with it.

No-one thinks that our modern prison system is working well. And given its mutually contradictory objectives, no-one ever will. The “punisher” complains about prisons being too soft, not sufficiently harsh, sentences being too short, and parole too readily granted. The “rehabilitator” complains about high recidivism rates, arguing that people are left in gaol's too long and are unable to re-adjust to life outside—and so on. This is why the prison system and what to “do” with criminals remains a political football—no-one has answers that can hope to meet all the contradictory objectives which our pagan society regards as equally important.

What is needed is a solid, overwhelmingly believed, principal objective of imprisonment, grounded in essential principles of justice—which must be pursued and achieved above all else. Other benefits which might accrue or result would then be collateral outcomes, but not objectives and not the point of prison. Only then will we be able to have a coherent prison system.

So, what might Jerusalem contribute to this issue? In the first place, we are going to lay aside the question of whether there ought to be prisons at all. There are Christian philosophers or thinkers who question the rectitude and wisdom of the prison system or model per se. We are going to assume that we will have prisons for some time, and that, for better or worse, they are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future.

But we do wish to insist on one point which it turns out will be crucial to any coherent approach. We must acknowledge—all parties must acknowledge—that prisons are slave camps. No, seriously. Quell the rising bile for a moment. Whatever else they are, whatever else they might be or do, prisons are inescapably and indisputably institutions of slavery. “Official” slavery to be sure, but slavery nonetheless.

Now this principle is repugnant to the modern world. Never use the “s” word. Whatever name we might give to prisons (penitentiary, correctional institution, custodial block, maximum security facilities) no-one can bring themselves to call them by their proper name. All of the names above are euphemisms. All the current names avoid the reality. Prisons remain inescapably places of enslavement—to which people are committed against their will, in which they lose their freedom, and to which they are bound. Yup, sounds pretty much like slavery.

A slave is a person who has had control over his own life and body taken away, by force. We use the term “body” deliberately, for no-one on earth can finally control the mind and spirit of another human being without chemicals. But involuntary control of one's body—how one spends one's time, uses one's labour—is what it means to be enslaved. This is what it means to be owned by another.

After all, the prison is not a voluntary institution. The State takes the criminal by force and commits him to prison against his will and for the time of his sentence controls the physical behaviour of the inmate. He is told when to rise, when to sleep, how to spend his time, what to eat, with whom to associate, etc. He is owned by the State. In principle there is no difference whatsoever with prisoners in former times being committed to slave galleys, being chained to oars, and required to row on command.

But, having said that, there is one outstanding difference: modern prisons consist of slaves who do not work. That's right. Never in the history of human race have we ever seen such a bizarre version of slavery as what the stupidity of man has brought forth in the institution of the modern prison. Convicted criminals are enslaved in every aspect, except being required to work.

To summarise, the prison system is the institution thought up by modern humanist ideology to deal with (or to) criminals. But there is no consensus or agreement on what being "dealt" with means; therefore, there is no settled societal view on what prisons are to achieve or accomplish. There is only a pot pourri of conflicting objectives--so conflicting in fact that each undermines the other. The result is confusion and mess.

The bottom line is, however, that the prison system represents the modern manifestation of slavery, which has always been part of human societies. In our modern world, criminals are enslaved, yet with a bizarre variant: for the first time in human history we have seen a civilisation embrace legally sanctioned slavery, yet not require the slaves to work. Go figure.

Of course the modern prison system did not used to be that way. For over a century, to be imprisoned in many cases meant being sentenced to hard labour. This was much more consistent with being enslaved. However, it became very clear over time that the system was failing. Firstly, there was the school of thought which argued that hard prison labour should be a form of punishment. Thus, conditions were deliberately kept very difficult. Prisoners were brutalised. Work was largely meaningless (for example, carrying large stones from one end of a yard to the other, repeatedly, day after day). Society could not sustain policies of deliberate cruelty and inhumanity to other human beings. Moreover as time passed it became very clear that such such "hard labour" brutalized and dehumanised people: they started to act according to the way they were treated.

Then, secondly, the work approach changed to one of seeking to give prisoners meaningful employment, teaching them trades and skills which they could learn on the outside. This turned the prison into more of a reformatory, less a penitentiary. The focus was less on punishment, more on rehabilitation. But this, too, could not be sustained. The economics of the model were deeply flawed. Prison work failed to keep pace with industrial and technological development. But even in its heydey, prison commerce undermined competitor private sector businesses; inefficiency became rife; feather bedding and poor quality, the norm. The model devolved fairly quickly back into meaningless labour.

So, prison slaves were no longer required to work, which is where we are today.
So, the question becomes, what is the appropriate activity for modern society's incarcerated slaves? In order to answer that question we need to return to the issue of what the principal objective of the imprisonment or enslavement of a criminal ought to be.

At this juncture Jerusalem parts ways with Athens. Jerusalem is fundamentally concerned with justice. Athens is far more concerned with retribution, at one extreme, and rehabilitation, on the other. Neither pole is intrinsically connected to or related to justice itself. This is why in New Zealand the Department of Justice is responsible for the court system; the prisons are run by the Department of Corrections. The institution of the prison and prison policies are not grounded in, nor related to justice.

We can well understand why modern pagan society has a problem with the concept of justice. In the humanist frame, where man is the ultimate reality and nothing human is foreign, that which is seen as evil can have no higher or deeper warrant than current public prejudice or preference. Moreover, distinguishing coherently between what is evil and what should be regarded as a crime is impossible. While all crimes are by definition evil, not all evils are crimes. Pagan man has no reference point to make the distinction. Modern society can rise no higher than "it is bad because we say so." Therefore, it is completely understandable that modern pagan society would downplay or ignore justice as a fundamental driver of the prison institution and prison policy. In the modern world, justice is a completely relative and plastic notion. It is only a connotation, a feeling, a hunch, a popular opinion.

But Jerusalem is different. For Jerusalem, justice is meaningful and has definitive denotation because the Living God alone is the Judge. Judgement belongs to Him. Vengeance against evil belongs to Him. Not all evils are punished in this life. Justice in this life is very important, but is limited, prescribed, and proscribed. Justice within Jerusalem is focused far more upon the victim than the criminal, because vengeance and just retribution belong to God and His jealous actions, not to man. God's justice will not be finally revealed or executed until that final Day--but none will escape His assizes. Every thought, word, and deed of every human being will be judged with infallible knowledge and terrible retribution against evil on that Day.

Therefore, in this life and prior to that Day, ensuring that the criminal gets his just desserts is not a fundamental driver of the administration of justice. But ensuring that the criminal is made to restitute those he has harmed is a proper and approriate focus and emphasis of justice in this life. If the victim is not restituted, justice has not been done. This is justice within Jerusalem.

So, now we come to the most important and fundamental question with respect to the prison system: how does the modern prison system facilitate and achieve criminals restituting victims of their crime? It simply does not. Therefore, we conclude that the modern humanist prison system is not just fundamentally flawed in a pragmatic sense, but it is prfoundly unjust. To that extent it is a wicked and evil system.

Might it be reformed into a system of justice? Yes, we believe so. Our next post will endeavour to describe how just prisons would work in a more Christian world.

Hamas Rockets

A Modest Proposal

The government of Gaza has repeatedly broken both international law and the Law of God. It has repeatedly attacked Israel, neighbouring state, with home made rockets. Moreover, these rockets are not targeted at military installations, but civilian populations.

Israel has a right in law to retaliate. A defensive war is always a just war. Israel also has a right under the Law of God to defend itself. It is the duty of civil government to protect its people from aggression and to punish the evildoers who murder and take life.

This is all pretty simple stuff--ethically speaking. But it never ceases to amaze us how a host of irrelevancies are allowed so quickly to cloud such crimes.

From the convenience of our armchairs we would like to pan a few of the irrelevancies and make some suggestions.

The appeal to pity currently being made worldwide is a fallacious irrelevance. The picture that is painted of David-like Hamas bravely constructing some home made low-tech rockets, going up against the high-tech Goliath, and therefore deserving of sympathy is an ethical blight. Counting up relative civilian casualties is also not that helpful.

Painting the Palestinian people as historical victims of Jewish or Zionist or western policy of lebensraum is not relevant either as a justification for their aggression. We have no doubt that the historical acts were wicked; they represented theft by the worst kind of force; the taking of property of Palestinians was just plan wrong. But--and here is the big but--developing a culture of victimhood and revenge out of historical injustice is equally wicked and wrong.

We believe that most western governments find themselves utterly unable to call Palestinians to account at this very point because they themselves trade daily in the politics of victimhood.

In the providence of God, virtually every people on earth can claim historical injustices which have been perpetrated upon their ancestors. Virtually every people on earth has been forcibly dispossessed at one time or another. There is no mandate to attempt to right historical wrongs by seeking vengeance in the present. The Scriptures teach us to accept the past, do away with vengeance, do good to one's neighbour, and get on with living as God's servants. This is the command of Christ--those who would disregard it will reap the consequences. Thus, Jerusalem would say to both Israel and Gaza that all historical grievances and claims and injustices must be laid at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ, left there in His hands, and forgotten.

Thus, both Israel and Gaza must be called to live in a holy and just way in the present. When we do that, the matter becomes very straightforward, ethically. Shooting rockets at neighbouring countries, damaging property and killing its citizens is both theft and murder, It must be punished. The lawful authority appointed by God to punish is the government. It can no more not be punished than ignoring murderers.

Hamas is the lawful government of Gaza, elected by the people. If the lawful government of Gaza will not punish those who have manufactured and launched missiles into Israel, then the government of Israel must. It would be derelict in its God given duty not to act to punish the evildoers.

The next question that is begged is, how to act? Here is where practical wisdom ought to apply. Israel's apparent current objective of destroying Hamas seems to us to be both impractical, unachievable, and inappropriate. For one thing, it takes the focus off the lawless crimes perpetrated by the government of Gaza and introduces far wider issues of national sovereignty, rights to exist or not as a nation, regime change, and so forth.

From the very first time a rocket was launched into Israel in an unprovoked attack, Israel should have made clear its policy and intentions. Its declared policy should be one of punishing murderers and thieves: the method of punishment will be according to fundamental principles of justice and equity. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.

Then, in open court, before the world--particularly before the Arab world--the government of Israel should count up the number of rockets fired into Israel every day, announce the number (offering observers from Arab nations to confirm the number, if necessary), and pronounce to Gaza that it will launch the exact same number of rocket attacks upon Gaza within the next twenty-four hours as a judicial sentence for the criminal acts. It should also make clear that it will take no further action because justice would have been served once sentence is carried out. However, it should make clear that any future criminal acts will be punished in a condign manner. Then, when the sentence is carried out, it should also announce this fact also to the people of Gaza.

It should pursue this policy with relentless faithfulness until the government of Gaza stops its lawless and murderous actions. This would also avoid the need for endless hand wringing by the international "community", calls for cease fires, vain attempts to broker peace--all of which deflects and distracts from the heart of the matter. Israel would simply say to the world--punishment for crime will stop when the criminals stop. Using the exact number of retaliatory rockets as launched against it would serve to underscore this fact repeatedly. Constant announcements of sentence and their being carried out would also reinforce the judicial nature of the action--and this is a critical point. It is a matter of justice, not politics, or international relations.

The same action should be taken with respect to suicide bombing. If a suicide bomber is established as having come from Gaza, the formal announcement of sentence should be made, and of the punishment that will fall. Once again, this should be done formally and in open court as it were. If the government of Gaza failed to bring the perpetrators and conspirators to justice by executing them within a given time frame, punishment would fall upon the nation by rocket strike or bombing. Some people will complain that this will result in and endless cycle of violence--but should the fact that crime is committed every day be a reason for the state to stop prosecuting and punishing criminals?

It is a fundamental duty of the government of Israel to punish governments or people responsible for attacking its citizens. To the extent that it has supinely accepted unprovoked rocket attacks for years, it has failed its people and its duty under God. To the extent that Israel has now escalated this into wider political objectives, such as destroying Hamas, it shows it has failed to focus upon its fundamental duties. It has muddied the waters. It has obscured the fundamental legal and ethical issues. It has given ammunition to the islamists and their fellow-travellers in the West. It has allowed politics to occlude the work of justice.

Thus, indeed, we will once again fall back into the endless cycle of violence in the Middle East. This will continue until governments decide that they will obey God, and not men.

"Corporate" Prisons

Myopia and Prejudice

"Bomber" who posts sporadically at Tumeke! has recently favoured us with an ideological broadside against the idea of prisons being managed by corporates. It is not worth much--except as an illustration of the prejudice and cant of those who substitute slogans for thought.

Here follows the fisked piece: firstly, an excerpt from the NZ Herald:

More prisoners will have to work under a National government, and the money they earn will go towards a victims' fund. Those who refuse will lose their right to parole. National leader John Key announced plans to boost work and rehabilitation schemes yesterday, and confirmed it would allow the private sector to run prisons again. Mr Key said a National government would spend $7 million a year boosting the number of inmates in industry-based work from 2500-3500 by the end of 2011.
Mr Key said prisoners were usually paid between 20c and 60c an hour but were charged out at market labour rates.

Then follows one long sentence from Bomber:

So we enter the time of the corporate Gulag,

One would have thought that a "corporate Gulag" would refer to a place where companies and their managers were incarcerated under harsh conditions, but in Bomber's lexicon it means a prison being managed by a private company, contracting its services to the Corrections Department. Presumably, Bomber's lexicon also has "state Gulag" to refer to prisons staffed by employees of the Corrections Department. We doubt it. The terms "corporate" and "Gulag" are used to vent spleen, not analyse or critique.

Prisoners forced to work at what is effectively slave labour where smug National Party supporters get to race past motorways where chain gangs sing spirituals under a hot South Auckland sky,

Under the current "state Gulags" prisoners work for between 20 and 60 cents an hour; the product of their labour and services is sold at market rates. Presumably, under the present system, Bomber and his mates race smugly past prisons where chain gangs are currently working, and they feel good about it, by virtue of it being a "state Gulag" not a corporate one.

National is proposing that the difference not be ploughed back into the "state Gulag" system, but be put into a fund to be used to compensate victims.

so hateful has our social policy become it has been warped into this abortion, exactly as it has been in America with the same vested interests of longer prison sentences and larger prison slave work force,

One of the most abiding myths amongst left-wing commentators is that because the private sector must make a profit in order to survive, its motivation is intrinsically and necessarily exploitative and evil. State entities escape all such evil motivations. As soon as a bureaucracy is formed it is systemically righteous by definition. All possible self-serving and evil motivations disappear.

So, privately run prisons have a vested interest in keeping people in prison as long as possible, and having as many of those prisoners working in slave labour as feasible. Really. Presumably Bomber has chosen to overlook the fact that prison sentences come from courts, not prisons. Time in prison is finite. Corrections cannot unilaterally alter the terms of a prison sentence. So, a rather large non sequitur, Mr Bomber.

Secondly, National is proposing that labour be voluntary. No prisoner can be compelled to labour (as at present), so hardly the emotive "prison slave work force" Bomber describes. But, National is also proposing that if a prisoner chooses not to labour and effectively work for the restitution of his victim(s) he would not be eligible for parole. In other words, working up to forty hours a week offers the potential of a shortened sentence--the precise opposite of what Mr Bomber is alleging. Ooops. Don't let the facts get in the way of a myopic idological diatribe.

Private prisons don’t give a toss about rehabilitation, they care only for longer sentences (meaning the prisoners stay longer, meaning they get more money to hold them)

Mr Bomber is fixated upon this recurring fetish over evil motivations being intrinsic to privately run prisons. He argues that the profit motive incentivises them to have more prisoners and longer sentences, so the prison management company gets paid more. Dearie me. Firstly, let's deal with the cant. So, Corrections does not have a similar evil incentivisation. What about the senior managers of state run prisons--the bigger the prisons, the greater their responsibilities, the higher their salaries? Of course. What about the Corrections unions? The more prisoners, the more prison staff, the more powerful the union, the bigger the bargaining power. Corrections is utterly at risk of the same evil, corrupt, self-serving practices. In fact, far more at risk than privately run prisons because their motivations are systemic--part of the system.

With privately run prisons, the discipline of needing to make a profit offers much more flexibility in motivation. Contractual terms can be set to offer the company more revenue if defined outcomes are achieved. Thus, any perverse motivations can be far more effectively managed and controlled by contractual terms.

Secondly, the blind prejudice: are we to understand that private firms contracting services to the government are likewise compromised, such that all outcomes create greater problems? Take for example the State education system contracting private firms to clean schools. Is Bomber going to argue that such arrangements are inherently evil because private school caretaking firms are incentivised via the profit motive to keep schools dirtier for longer, so they get more work and earn bigger profits? Really. Is that the way it works? To be consistent he must argue that way--but this is both ignorant and absurd.

Or, take private diagnostic labs. Bomber, if he were to be consistent, would have to argue that all private diagnostic labs contracted to the public health system are evilly incentivised to misdiagnose, overtest, destroy records, repeat work, etc. all for the incentive of more profit. Or take consulting specialists contracted to public hospitals. Clearly, this must be wicked in Mr Bomber's warped world view because private specialists have an incentive to botch operations so they have to be repeated, thereby getting bigger fees--or perform operations that are not necessary, increasing their profits. What a strange warped Alice-in-Wonderland world Bomber lives within.

and while holding them they get to implement prison labour as a cheap workforce, they make money off the labour of prisoners –

Actually, Bomber has this completely around the wrong way. Under the current system Corrections uses prison labour as a cheap workforce. In Bomber's terms, currently prisoners are currently slaves of the State--something he conveniently overlooks. The margin on their "slave labour" is currently paid to the government. Under the system National is proposing neither the State nor any private prison management firm would benefit from the margin on prisoners' work--but the victims of crime. Seems much fairer and appropriate to us.

see how in that equation how the Private Prison doesn’t give a toss about rehabilitation and why only the state should be allowed to incarcerate you against your will and not a corporation?

Once again Bomber graces us with two wonderful non sequiturs. Since under National's proposal both bureaucratically run and private sector run prisons won't benefit from the work of prisoners, there is no argument against privately run prisons per se. But in neither case, does that policy have any possible bearing at all upon rehabilitation whether in a bureaucractically or private sector adminstered prison. If anything, the terms of the policy actually encourage rehabilitation, assuming that meaningful work disciplines will help assist prisoner rehabilitation.

And, true to form, he ends his diatribe with one last non-sequitur--namely, that privately run prisons mean that the state is not the incercerator, but a corporation. This is a juvenile confusion between an principal and an agent. Maybe if Bomber had attended a privately run school he would have learnt the distinction years ago. Or, maybe not. There is such a phenomenon as invincible ignorance.