Opinion
C. S. Lewis had a number of things to say about “humanitarian” theories of crime and punishment, as they stood in his day. His remarks stand the test of time admirably. After all, who couldn’t read the opening words of The Silver Chair, with its description of “modern” school, Experiment House, and not think how things have only gotten worse:
It was “Co-educational”, a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a “mixed” school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it. These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others… The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favourite than otherwise.
All we’d need to change is the bit about “interesting psychological cases”: nowadays, it’d be “intergenerational victims of Colonialism”.
But they’re still being indulged as favourites, instead of being punished as the criminal psychopaths they are.
Youth justice laws need to stop treating criminal minors as “little angels” and start applying “tough love” to lawless children, the federal Labor MP representing Alice Springs has declared.
In an extraordinary intervention against her own party’s handling of the Northern Territory youth crime crisis, Marion Scrymgour says authorities need to stop “pussyfooting around” on juveniles, that the decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility is not working, and that it is time for parents to be held accountable for their children’s actions.
As it happens, Scrymgour is Aboriginal: actual Aboriginal, not a pasty-faced box-ticker from Melbourne or Sydney. And she has direct experience of Aboriginal criminality.
Ms Scrymgour – the federal MP for Lingiari – had her own home broken into while she was sleeping last month, and said governments needed to make serious changes to NT youth justice laws.
But leave it to the hand-wringing white-left to think they know better.
It came as NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler said in a “perfect world” she would not have children in detention facilities, and linked her opening of a new youth justice centre in Alice Spring on Wednesday to the British sending convicts to Australia in the 18th century.
After revelations in The Australian of children as young as 10 driving stolen cars around the streets of Alice Springs, Ms Lawler said that young people had been in criminal trouble for “the whole history of Australia” and that the nation’s history was built on the convict system.
Cool — does that mean we can give the little buggers six of the best, like in the good old convict system? Or maybe a sharp spear up the jacksie, as per “traditional law”?
But Lawler’s fatuous idiocy is just the tip of the useless, leftist iceberg when it comes to Aborigines and law and order.
“There’s got to be a rethink of how we deal (with youth crime) … a bit of tough love never hurt anyone and I think that’s what needs to come into this equation,” [Scrymgour] told The Australian.
“We’ve got to stop thinking we’re dealing with little angels here … When you look at those photos they’re laughing and smiling, they think it’s a joke, and it’s not, because they could have an accident and one of them could get killed.
Well, cry me a river. Although, as is usually the case, it’s not the feral who takes itself out, but the innocent bystanders who get killed by the feral who walks away, scot-free.
And the grim reality is that the crime and lawlessness start at the home.
“We’ve got to stop pussyfooting around here and thinking that these kids are going and they’re being taken home to a responsible adult because in a lot of these cases there isn’t a responsible adult there and the reality is these kids don’t listen.”
But, of course, it’s everyone’s fault but the drunken louts churning out a generation of feral children.
As she was opening a $32m detention centre for juvenile criminals on Wednesday, Ms Lawler conceded the crime crisis was a failure of government, but linked youth crime to colonial history.
The Australian
We haven’t been a colony for over one hundred years. Which should have been more than enough time for Aboriginal communities to pull their act together. Unfortunately, you can’t help those who won’t help themselves.
That doesn’t mean you have to tolerate getting your stuff stolen by their vicious offspring.