Crime Punishment by Russell Marks

Author:Russell Marks [Marks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9781863957175
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23845706
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2015-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

VICTIMS

I can hear the criticism of my arguments at this point. ‘What about the victims? You’ve expressed a lot of sympathy for criminals, but shouldn’t most of your sympathy – and, indeed, your empathy – be reserved for the people they have harmed?’

It’s a point that’s often raised with criminal defence lawyers, who imagine they’re in the human rights protection game until someone who’s not a defence lawyer reminds them of the prevailing community attitude. But people tell me all the time: ‘You’re defending bad people and trying to get them off!’

There’s truth to this, of course, and it’s a truth all would-be reformers of the criminal justice system must tackle. What I’m going to advance in this chapter is the idea that we should focus on the needs of victims much more than we do – and that doing so doesn’t mean we can’t also focus more on offenders’ needs. Or, more accurately, on what society needs to prevent offenders from committing crimes.

To be a victim of a crime is a terrible thing. I’ve never been physically assaulted as an adult, and for that I’m grateful. But I have been a victim of crime. The night we moved into our current flat, some things were stolen from our car. Exhausted after a day of moving, I’d inadvertently left the car unlocked and returned the next morning to find that a piggybank full of silver coins, some CDs and my partner’s backpack containing her uni notes, her prescription glasses and her passport were missing. We retrieved the backpack and most of the notes after receiving a call from someone who had found my partner’s phone number in her diary; he said the bag had been dumped on the footpath outside the school where he worked as a groundskeeper. But the glasses and the passport were gone. Altogether, the theft cost us about $700, which was significant to us, as well as the time it took to organise replacements.

I use the word ‘victim’ in a technical sense only: objectively, leaving a car door unlocked and suffering a minor theft is unlikely to earn me much sympathy (and it didn’t from my partner). But more significant than the financial cost, at least initially, were the feelings of mistrust. Where had we moved to? Had we made a big mistake? The carpark was secure, in the sense that you needed a key to get in. We thought the thief had to be one of our neighbours or someone known to them. Would it happen again? The mind slides quickly to paranoia. Were we being targeted, perhaps as unwanted newcomers in an apartment-block conspiracy? Why us?

When we learned how notoriously prone to theft ‘secure’ underground carparks are, that rational observation did not immediately displace our emotional responses. It took some days for us to convince ourselves that we hadn’t just moved into the least safe building in Australia.

The crime wasn’t even that bad. The house in which I grew up was burgled once, when I was a child, the thieves making off with a couch and a bed among other things.

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