National play tough on crime emotional pearl clutching over ‘good character’
National’s latest “tough on crime” announcement is being slammed by legal experts as another emotionally-driven law-and-order stunt — one that may generate headlines and outrage, but does little to reduce offending or make communities safer in the long term.
considering good character references while sentencing sex offenders, but lawyers warn the change could lead to less fair sentencing.
While character references could still be provided to the court under National’s planned law change, judges will not be able to take the submissions into consideration.
Defence lawyer Samira Taghavi said the references matter because they help the court assess true culpability, likelihood of reoffending, and prospects of rehabilitation.
Taghavi said it was “dangerous” and “knee-jerk populism” that would cause real injustice in practice.
NZME
Defence lawyer Samira Taghavi is 100% correct.
This is dangerous knee-jerk populism because National love to manipulate our anger at crime to pursue pointless counterproductive tough on crime rhetoric.
Crime politics in New Zealand is driven by emotion
We are really good in this country at allowing our feelings dictate law and order, which is quite ironic when you consider what an emotionally up-tight and frigid culture we are.
We are so emotionally repressed in New Zealand that anger, depression and hunger are the only acceptable expressions of any feelings and when it comes to punishing prisoners, we seem to fantasise about orange jumpsuited chain gangs breaking rocks on the roadside while singing ‘Ol’ Man River”.
So, what we have from National with this sudden concern that sex offenders could ever be deemed of good character is just more bullshit posturing under the guise of some manufactured moral disgust.
It’s the exact same puritanical crap that justified removing prisoners voting rights.
We have a ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ news media pumping crime porn for the clickbait, this generates an emotional anger at crime and that anger gets manipulated by the Right.
A broken prison system creates more dangerous offenders
Beyond the emotional pearl clutching that sex offenders could ever be considered human is the reality that this will simply result in more prisoners going into our broken, underfunded and violent prison system without any chance of rehabilitation.
That’s what National are promising, more prisoners inside prison for longer without treatment so that when they are vomited back up by a panicked prison system frightened that the prisoner they are releasing after an enormous lag generated by Parole boards refusing to grant parole because they haven’t completed rehabilitation programs have spent 22 hours a day for eight years inside a prison cell without any rehab.
Our prison system is really good at taking broken men and making them monsters.
That’s all National are promising. ‘More monsters for the future.’
National and there dopey coalition buddies still have 6 months to do more damage to our country. November can’t come fast enough for many of us who are anxious to get rid of them.
There will be a lot of mess to fix, it’s not going to be easy.
I just view this as further confirmation that Nationals internal polling shows that ALL women voters have abandoned them.
Because NZ women recognise an abusive relationship a mile away.
They can also spot a wimp a mile away, bad news for Luxon.
I’ve already seen stickers and posters reminding the public that this government stole $12 billion from hard working women. Many of whom put themselves at great risk to care for your loved ones during Covid.
That issue isn’t going away soon.