Punching on ones own like yourselves is soul destroying, we need a few friends. Keen to learn of your friends?
Professor of criminology at Victoria University, Philip Stenning, recently visited the Napier Public Library to view the Robson Collection, which is a special collection on criminal, restorative and social justice based on the philosophy of "developing communities not prisons".
Named after John Lochiel Robson (1909-1993), the collection was developed as a community initiative by the Napier Pilot City Trust, and it relies totally on donations from the community and around the world.
"I've had a fairly long association with John Robson himself, he is one of my predecessors, being the founding director of the institute of criminology where I'm now the director." says Philip.
"John's whole vision was that doing criminal justice too big a task for government and that the only way you can really achieve effective justice is by involving communities and embedding "the doing of justice" in the communities themselves."
He believes the Robson collection is a very significant element in what's happening here in Napier, because it represents an effort to provide a unique knowledge base from which the community can develop sensible community positions.
"John Robson was very insistent 'that's it's not enough to have a community - it has to be a well-informed community", because the alternative to a contribution from the well-informed community is ill-informed and prejudiced vigilantism and the lynch-mob scenario."
Criminals have been called a lot of things over the years, including 'society's trash', and Philip analogises the disposal of rubbish to highlight his point. "The traditional idea of how we deal with rubbish is to collect it, put it in a rubbish bin and put it out on the street and then the city comes and takes it away.
Then you don't worry about what happens to it afterwards, or how much there is.
What we've come to realise now is that this is not an acceptable way to deal with rubbish because for a start the city doesn't have unlimited capacity to deal with rubbish, but more to the point, the environment doesn't have unlimited capacity to absorb and accommodate all that rubbish.
What we see in the environmental area is a whole lot of new initiatives and more effective ways to dispose of rubbish, but more importantly, more effective ways to prevent rubbish from accumulating in the first place.
We are seeing is an increased effort to require the community to take responsibility for the amount of rubbish it produces and what happens to it afterwards. In some ways we've treated crime and criminals in a very similar way in the past.
When a crime occurred, you'd call the police and expect them to take the person away and deal with it and you don't worry about it afterwards.
We've now realised that is not an effective way to deal with rubbish, and John Robson and others have been promoting is that this is an ineffective way to deal with crime and criminals.
We need think of new ways of dealing with this, and to persuade communities to accept responsibility, not just for dealing with it but for the generation of criminality in itself." He says we need to get people to recognise that criminality starts in the home, in the schools and in our institutions.
"Criminals aren't "out there", they're not "them", they're "us", and that's what the idea of community-based criminal justice and penal policy is all about, getting the citizenry to understand that the origins of criminality are within the community."
While some groups, like the Sensible Sentencing Trust for instance, could argue that this approach would absolve the criminals of responsibility, Philip says this is not the case.
"No, we're not doing that. After all, committing a crime is a choice, but it's a choice that is structured by the environment in which people grow up. If we want to reduce or prevent crime, we have to not only work on changing people's choices but also work on changing the underlying environment within which they make those choices."
He agrees it is not easy to solve the problem, which is often deeply rooted in particular lifestyles.
"For instance, take the kid who goes to school after a night of not much sleep because his parents have been fighting. He hasn't had breakfast, he can't learn on an empty stomach, he can't concentrate, he's falling asleep all the time, so he fails in school. And where does he end up?
He ends up in a criminal lifestyle. And you can treat that kid all you like, but unless you address the underlying problems that led him into that lifestyle in the first place then you're not solving the problem.
It's a case of recognising that the roots of crime are in our own communities, they're in our own homes, they're in our own institutions, and we have to address those as well as dealing with the crime after the event. This is why the whole community needs to be involved, because the only people who can change those things are the community itself."
By Carolyn Veen posted 5 November 04
Photo: The John Robson Collection
Related:
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NSW prisoners held in a "box within a box" with "no fresh air or sunlight" at the countries terrorist jail (HRMU) or High Risk Management Unit at Goulburn Correctional Centre, (a super-max prison in NSW), are said to have followed Osama Bin Laden from their isolated cells.
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There used to be a (VJ) or Visiting Justice who would go into the prison and judge any claim or accusation that was made by any prisoner or prison guard. If it were found that a prisoner had offended then punishment was metered out.
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The gates into the HRMU were blocked by over twenty five armed police. The Inspectors in charge, Greg Jago and Alan Whitten said access to the institution was being denied.
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Justice Action is trying to obtain documents on behalf of prisoners held in the Goulburn High Risk Management Unit (HRMU) from the Federal Attorney General's Department, Corrective Services Minister's Conference regarding the process described below, in which the Standard Guidelines for Corrections in Australia were adopted.
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New South Wales is hosting a two-day conference of state and territory prisons ministers on how to detain terrorists. John Hatzistergos and Bob Carr know all about it having the states most draconian terrorist unit already. The (HRMU) acronym Harm-U the High Risk Management Unit at Goulburn.
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To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."-- Marilyn vos Savant.
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