Sensible Sentencing Trust 'under threat'

The problems with the SST is many, this is only a few: 1) SST will not divulge it's funding. That sparks dishonesty and no transparency. You can't have your cake and eat it as well. 2) SST appears to be a puppet of a GEO type group. 3) SST is sitting on the bottom of a cliff waiting for criminals, there is nothing positive about SST, it's an ancient form of the gallows. 4) Victims are not served and neither are offenders from SST. They are kicked while still being kicked and kicked more.

I was pleased to read that the SST may be denied charitable status. This does not mean that I am not every bit as concerned for the victims of crime as Mr McVicar, however the SST is obviously a political bandwagon that allows him and others of like mind to try and effect draconian changes to our society without the moderating influence of the electorate. I will gladly supply names of suitable grief counsellors for this unhappy man that would help him to recover without him inflicting injury to the NZ public. The last tirade that I heard emanating from the organisation advocated a workhouse for debtors. Like many of the SST policies, this is straight out of the 19th century. If any further proof was required to demonstrate how out of touch the man and his supporters are, well this is it!

Argh Denis! You covered it all! Garth is trying to build his ranks with the vulnerable so he can gain a bit of recognition not to mention a chance to silently work his way to a seat in parliament. Four words for ya Mcvicar, get a REAL JOB!

Garth Mcvicar is a bent on hate and revenge who uses victims for his politic motives that are nothing more than his vulnerable naive pawns that Mcvicar rubs salt in their wounds of memories so they open up and never heal.
Mcvicar wants to arm dairy liquor shop keeper with guns s, supports the killing of graffiti writers and wants smack the children to be lawful and the list goes on and on about barbaric dark age thinking.
How can anyone take this Mcvicar seriously except some old granny that Mcvicar forces fear into their lives with over exposing statistics?
Politicians know Mcvicars a political hate monger and good time to cut the gravy train from the leach using fools for his political agendas.
If you look at Mcvicars members and growth such as Peter Jenkins they are the same old bunch going round in circles preying on the granny’s for donations.

And yet, James, victims do face particular issues of trauma, psychological damage and physical injury from the violent intentional acts of others. I do agree with you that it is important to balance rehabilitation and punitive sanctions, but victims and their advocates have a legitimate case. Both need to be used so that these violent offenders do not reoffend.

One could also argue that we are now reaping the whirlwind of the destructive New Right social and economic policies of the eighties and nineties, in which government social services were slashed and NGOs were overloaded, so that some people became entrenched in intergenerational dysfunctional and abusive family contexts, untreated mental illness and criminal social networks, therefore creating current levels of violent offending.

Jenkins is wrong. There is no root cause. There are many causes - parents addicted to alcohol and drugs, psychological and sexual abuse by parents, violence inflicted on children by parents, emotional neglect by parents, abandonment by parents, the presence of (male) step-parents in the family home, poverty, lack of education, parents in prison, social and emotional alienation, alcohol and drug addiction of the offender, colonialism, etc, etc. These are the root causes of offending and of re-offending - there is no distinction between the two.

Peter Jenkins is right. The root cause of reoffending is that we have made it so easy to reoffend over the last 50 years. Combine that with our dogma of paying children to have babies and not only allowing criminals to bring up criminals but paying them to do so and you see why crime is such a growth industry with massive consequences for our society in the future, the least of which is the massive cost of turning the juggernaut around. SST is virtually the only organisation prepared to admit how serius the problem is and to try to put a lid on it.

I'm probably a moderate on this one. I would definitely class myself as a social liberal on most issues, apart from criminal justice policy, where I agree with most of the Sensible Sentencing Trust's individual policies.

However, I wish it wouldn't keep aligning itself with organisations and causes that have nothing whatsoever to do with victims rights and greater severity in criminal sentencing. Or backing contentious measures like binding citizens referenda.

Jenkins writes: "The ideology that underlies the approach of the last 30-40 years is that repeat serious offenders should have the same rights as everyone else. This is the root cause and origin of most of the problems in our criminal justice system." This statement shows how little those in the SST seem to understand about justice. While it may be true that the system has overlooked the right of victims, allowing offenders 'rights' as well as victims should not be seen as a problem in a humane society. Offenders are also human beings and everyone (whether victims or offenders) should be accorded the dignity of having 'rights' as human beings. Unfortunately, the SST tends to see it as a competition between the rights of one group over the other. They scapegoat offenders, which is not dissimilar from the way Hitler scapegoated Jews and blamed them for all the problems in society. In the US, Christian fundamentalists blame homosexuals for many of society's problems and deny them the right to get married etc. These are just a couple of examples of one group in society blaming another for societies problems. In its zeal to assist victims,the SST falls into the same blaming trap - a trap which perpetuates prejudice and ignorance. The biggest problem in the criminal justice system is that it provides so few opportunities for rehabilitation - and virtually no support for prisoner coping with re-integration back into society. Judges fail to order 95% of offenders to have an alcohol and drug assessment even though most offending occurs under the influence of alcohol and drugs. The Corrections Department has an annual budget of around $1 billion a year, but spends only 3% of that on rehabilitation and about 0.3% on re-integration. That's why so many re-offend. In my view this is the root cause and origin of most of the problems in our criminal justice system.

Thank you to TV3 for the speedy correction of that story, very fast, well done. Candor also did a Press Release on this subject which can be found here; http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/candor-trust-charities-commission-attacks-democracy/5/30445 I'd also like to reiterate a point that cynical made - "placing criminals first in the pecking order, law abiding citizens 2nd and victims 3rd", when it should always have been the other way around. The ideology that underlies the approach of the last 30-40 years is that repeat serious offenders should have the same rights as everyone else. This is the root cause and origin of most of the problems in our criminal justice system. I wonder what happened to the line breaks in my last comment? Regards Peter Jenkins Webmaster for Sensible Sentencing Trust