Skip to comments | Skip to comment form | Skip to this weeks poll

NZCPD Guest Forum 
An interview with Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple)
29 October 06

Muriel Newman Interviews Theodore Dalrymple on his recent trip to New Zealand

You have been in New Zealand now for two weeks discussing issues relating to welfare and crime and the growth of an “underclass” in the context of the “Cradle to Prison” tour – what conclusions have you reached regarding the situation in New Zealand compared with Britain ?

When I first came to New Zealand in 1998 I naively thought New Zealand was a country that should have very few social problems. I discovered that you had many social problems that were very familiar, so our two countries, New Zealand and Britain , are very similar both in the causes and the effects.

Your crime and welfare statistics demonstrate that the situation here is quite bad and everyone I have spoken to is especially worried about the level of criminality. You only have to read the newspapers to see that it is not a small problem.

I’ll give you a small example to show that things are not too different from England . I was in Napier, a nice little town where people go to retire and where you wouldn’t think there would be many problems. But I was told that I shouldn’t go out at night after a certain time because of the ‘boy racers’ – these boy racers were demonstrating that the rule of law doesn’t operate in Napier after a certain time of night!

If you were in charge, what would you do to improve the situation with regard to the underclass problem?

We firstly have to recognise that there is a big problem. I think we are dealing with a very deep malaise, which is both cultural and governmental. The government has managed to make life - in an existential sense - more difficult for people because it has disconnected rewards from consequences. There is no longer much hope for getting rewards for hard work, and not much to fear from bad behaviour.

To change the system, one would have to alter the conditions under which assistance is given to people. I accept that for some people it is probably too late to change things. While one can’t change rules retrospectively, we can change the system prospectively. I’m not a great expert but we should be looking to the future, rather than trying to repair the damage that has been done - because the damage is irreparable.

As a writer, I see my role is to let people know what life is really like at the bottom – because otherwise people wouldn’t know…and so frankly, they wouldn’t care. But governments can only make changes if there is a general acceptance that things need to change. Governments can’t do things if there is no public support - even if they know they are right. So my role is to try to change the prevailing atmosphere.

Do you believe that welfare is at the heart of the problem of the underclass?

Welfare is a large part of the problem. Welfare makes the social pathology possible. Whether it makes it inevitable is another issue.

The other ingredient is the one that views human life as an existential supermarket – you choose your style of life from the huge variety that is available and someone else will take care of the consequences if it turns out that your choices are not the best! Choices must have consequences otherwise people will make bad choices and the results will be disastrous.

In your experience of dealing with serious criminal offenders is it possible to rehabilitate them?

There is not much evidence that anything we do to rehabilitate criminals, helps. Most seem to auto-rehabilitate once they reach a certain age - maybe they simply get too old to climb through windows!

In thinking about reducing re-offending, I’m all in favour of having good results, but sometimes you need to judge interventions by other things not just results. For example is it right to teach prisoners to read and write? I think the answer is yes; I believe you should teach them reading and writing but you might not see a difference straight away. In fact, you might need to follow them up for ten to twenty years before you would see that it makes a difference.

What would you change in the criminal justice system?

We do have to take more seriously the crimes that are committed. There is a big difference between primary and secondary prevention of crime: primary prevention involves trying to stop people committing crime in the first place by addressing such things as family structure and dealing with welfare. Secondary prevention is what you do with people who have committed crime and have chosen to live by criminality, and in this respect I think there is a place for longer sentences.

In particular, I believe there are five reasons why career criminals should have longer sentences.

Firstly, short sentences don’t teach anything except contempt for the law.

Secondly, when offenders are in prison on short sentences you can’t do anything with them, such as teach them to read.

Thirdly, when they get out, they simply go and commit more crime, so it all becomes very expensive.

Fourthly, short sentences create an atmosphere of intimidation - when the victims are giving evidence, they are afraid to talk openly because they know that the criminal will soon be back on the streets. If a general atmosphere of intimidation is able to become established, it ultimately leads to a failure of the rule of law. It is very demoralising to the police, who do a lot of work to get a conviction, only to find that the offenders are out on the streets committing more crime in no time at all.

Finally, if serious criminals - and not necessarily only those who commit the serious crimes, but also the offenders who commit multiple offences - cause the prevailing quality of life in the community to degenerate, then they risk promoting vigilantism. Also, short sentences send a terrible message to victims that their lives, their suffering, their property, and their safety, are not taken seriously by the state.

When people say prison doesn’t work, they are right, because it certainly is not working as it should. It is hardly even a deterrant. For example there shouldn’t be bail for people who have committed serious crime or who have long criminal records.

Also, there are certain crimes where justice demands that the crime is so serious that the offender should never be released from prison. As a society we need to recover the confidence to say: “If that is what you have done, freedom is not for you”. This is justice.

Someone should not expect to be able to commit a most frightful crime out of malevolence and then expect to be at liberty shortly afterwards - even if he no longer poses a threat to society. If we don’t have the confidence to say that, then a small section of the population will think “we have society on the run”. That is what is happening in New Zealand and Britain: huge numbers of highly intelligent people are trying to deal with the crime problem and a small number of shrewd people know that they have the whole of society on the run – like the boy racers in Napier who know that society lacks the will to do anything about their law-breaking.

What would you change in the welfare system?

I’m not an expert, but I think I would try to change welfare so that it became a system for relieving hardship that was not self-inflicted, with assistance being a hand up rather than a way of keeping people in a permanent state of dependency. So I would change the conditions on which it was given out.

I think there should be some attempt to connect what you receive to the reality of your circumstances. Working in the prison system, I could no longer say this was a particularly deserving case – because that is being judgmental and you can no longer make moral judgments. The problem is that you can no longer feel real sympathy for people if everyone is entitled to that same sympathy.

As a result, someone with multiple sclerosis for example, who is genuinely needy through no fault of their own, cannot get the help they deserve from the welfare system. That is because so many people are misbehaving and creating crises in their own lives that they absorb all the energy and resources of the social workers, leaving the truly needy neglected. In the present system of giving assistance according to need rather than according to who is the most deserving, bad behaviour creates enormous need and generates enormous resources and priority attention!

Is the welfare problem one that we can afford to ignore?

Let’s take the hypothesis that the problem doesn’t get worse, and it doesn’t get better - it just stays the same. There are hundreds of thousands of lives being blighted, so even if everything continues as it is now, I would argue that there is an ethical duty to improve the situation if we can.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are failing thousands of children by bringing them up in a very savage world. We have a duty to try to improve the situation.

The problem is though, how to improve things. I have worked in a state bureaucracy for many years and I have seen the cruelty and callousness that operates. It is not because the staff are bad people, but it is because they are being asked to do something that is impossible. There is no better way to demoralize people, than to ask them to do something that is impossible. For example, paid officials of the state cannot be good parents to children. Even well meaning paid officials cannot substitute for parents.

There is also a tendency of government to want to control more and more of our lives. In fact, there is a tendency of the bureaucracy to grow no matter which government is in power. However the left wing outlook is that if only government did enough for people, then everything would be all right!

It is very difficult to reform a government bureaucracy because it becomes dependent on the dependents. Then, of course, other groups including the corporate sector also become dependent on state contracts and before long such a large proportion of the population are dependent on the dependents that it is hard to see how anything can be changed! In Britain a great deal of private enterprise is now dependent on the government, creating a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” mentality.

If you would like to comment on this issue please click

Skip to top | Skip to comment form | Skip to this weeks poll

Your Comments:

Your comments will be published on the READERS FORUM. To view >>> 

Skip to top | Skip to comments |  Skip to this weeks poll

To leave a comment:

NOTE: The forum moderator reserves the right to edit material that may be objectionable or offensive.