Soundings

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 6

Soundings

by

DENIS McCAULEY

With an election coming up, it’s inevitable that in the next few weeks we’ll hear quite a lot about fighting crime; it has become quite a popular issue in recent years. Two kinds of error endanger the fight against crime: oversimplifying the probelm, and overcomplicating it. On one hand “law and order” advocates offer easy solutions to crime with their “gettough” rhetoric—which has a great deal of political appeal, no doubt, but very little real merit. On the other hand, many people treat the crime problem as if it’s so complicated we shouldn’t even try to find an answer. Crime, and the fear of crime, are dangerous threats to the quality of our lives—as can be seen from the social implications of the high crime rates in American cities—and even to the survival of our social order. Failure to control crime will, in time, weaken the citizenry’s confidence in our society. If we are to fight crime effectively, the essential strategy is to begin with a critical look at our institutions of criminal justice—the courts, the police, and the various penal bodies. Each of these institutions, at present, is to some failing us. The courts’ time is largely taken up with petty offences which in many cases should never appear in court and in many others would be more effectively handled by some other body. More serious cases have to wait until time is available to hear them; in the meantime people who may be innocent wait behind bars for trial, and people who may be guilty are free to roam the streets—depending on what decision a magistrate reaches on their suitability for bail, a decision that must be made on very little information at all. It has long been recognised that prisons teach their inmates more about crime than they do about jobs or socially-acceptable conduct. And the police must squander their efforts making pointless arrests (which in turn clog up the courts with needless cases) and by performing routine clerical duties while serious crime gets steadily worse. If we’re going to fight crime we have to change these institutions and make them work. This doesn’t mean accusing individual policemen, magistrates, penal officers, probation officers, and so on; it has to be recognised that it’s only the unnoticed but determined efforts of

many of these people that make the present institutions work at all. What it does mean is evolving a system of law that reflects our real values and priorities, and holding the leadership of our criminal justice institutions to performance standards while providing them with reasonable resources. Neither policy is in effect today, and little is being done to move toward them. We make strong, contradictory demands on our institutions of criminal justice. We expect policemen to be professionals, yet we treat them as menials. We tell them to adhere to the letter of the law, yet to catch criminals any way they can. We make certain actions criminal (such as "obscene” language, afterhours drinking, etc.) yet thousands of New Zealanders do them, including policemen. If we made our demands on the criminal process more reasonable, we would be better able to hold those in charge accountable for its operation. We’ve traditionally regarded our courts as too sacred, our police too professional, our prisons too distant to open them for public scrutiny and policy direction in the ways most other public agencies are. Effective criminal justice will require an end to all this. For our legislators, it will require a long, hard look at what should be considered criminal, what should be processed by our courts and dealt with by our police. For the police, it will require determining ethical and performance standards for their profession, through a permanent public commission or some other method, and holding individual policemen and police administrators to them. For the courts, it will mean a lighter workload, in terms of numbers, but it will also mean the creation of machinery to hold court officials accountable for their fairness and accuracy. Money is not the barrier to improving the criminal process. Extensive funds are now being largely squandered in this field, and many reforms would be self-financing (mainly through reducing the population of our penal institutions). The problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of hard-headed willingness to move beyond rhetoric to a restructuring of the priorities and the direction we give to our crime control institutions.