Why does crime start in the home?
Clear Thinking on Crime
Sponsored by the
Sensible Sentencing Trust
Phone 0900 SAFE NZ (7233 69)
For the Sake of Our Children Trust
raising awareness of child abuse in New Zealand
(17th October 2006)
Huge level of interest in Theodore Dalrymple’s reasons why and answers to serious community problems.
The former prison psychiatrist turned author, Theodore Dalrymple has attracted large crowds and a very positive response during the Cradle to Jail tour of NZ.
Dalrymple has thought provoking opinions about welfare dependency, crime, prisoners, sentencing and family structures. He has been brought to New Zealand by the Cradle to Jail Coalition to raise the level of debate about these issues.
Almost 400 people turned out to a lunch time meeting in Tauranga today, another 300 in Napier last Friday and in Wellington last Wednesday to listen to Dalrymple debate Green MP, Sue Bradford.
His final meeting is expected to attract a capacity crowd at Auckland Boys Grammar tomorrow night.*
Kevin McNeil, son of murdered Tokorora Primary School Teacher, Lois Dear, will also speaking at this final meeting.
“Theodore has also been invited onto Leighton Smith’s radio show on Newstalk ZB tomorrow for an entire hour between 10-11am. It’s not only a privilege but it also shows the level of interest Leighton expects from his callers”, said Cradle to Jail Coalition spokesman, Garth McVicar.**
Dalrymple has had a full schedule of public and private meetings, media interviews and speaking engagements during the 10 day Cradle to Jail Tour.
“The response he’s received has been amazing. People are genuinely interested and deeply concerned. They are seeking answers, solutions, “walk rather than talk”. Kiwis are desperate to prevent what has become inevitable for many of our children. Everyone is asking how we can change the future for children who seem predestined to crawl from the cradle to jail”.
“The high level of interest in Dalrymple’s visit must surely make all politicians focus on our future, show some leadership and change this social experiment for our children’s sakes
Cradle to Jail Coalition contacts:
SST, Garth McVicar – 027-248-7919
For The Sake Of Our Children, Christine Rankin - 027-582-4804
Family First NZ, Bob McCroskrie – 027-55-555-42
(12th October 2006)
Psychiatrist and social commentator Thedore Dalrymple has spent a lifetime working with the dregs of British society – violent criminals and the politicians he believes are responsible for many of the failings of modern society.
On Friday, he comes to Napier to talk about crime in this country and how to combat it. EVA BRADLEY spoke to the man described as “one of the greatest essayists of our age”.
He’s smart enough not to admit it, but Theodore Dalrymple is an intelligent man. His diatribe on bureaucratic red tape and the reasons for escalating crime are inflammatory enough to attract attention – both good and bad - but credible enough to be taken seriously.
Less than 24 hours after arriving in New Zealand this week, he had already opened a Pandora’s box of moral and social outrage by suggesting divorce should be outlawed except on the grounds of violence, infidelity or "failure to keep one's responsibilities". Tax breaks should be offered to married couples in order to reassert the power of the family and a "sexual revolution" was responsible for soaring domestic violence.
At a time when public interest groups and politicians are falling over themselves to find a politically correct solution for escalating crime and other social ills, Theodore Dalrymple is calling a spade a spade and making no apologies for it.
Described as "one of the greatest essayists of our age", Dalrymple (the pen name of psychiatrist Dr Anthony Daniels) has used his years of experience working in some of Britain’s poorest communities and in prisons and hospitals overrun with violent offenders to shine a light on the seemingly endless social problems plaguing modern society.
What he has discovered – and the way he expresses it through regular columns in high-brow publications like The Spectator in Britain, New York's City Journal and in numerous books – has left him out of favour among the left-wing politicians who frequently cross his radar, but made him somewhat of a hero amongst others who see sense in what he says.
Chiefly – that criminals commit crime because they choose to. While this might seem like a fairly rational assumption to many, in the 21st century there are any number of "mitigating factors" legitimised by governments and legal systems which Dalrymple believes have allowed offenders to run rough-shod over their victims and society in general.
Instead of holding offenders accountable for their actions, he argues that the pervasive liberal elite have persuaded those at the bottom that they are not moulders of their own lives – that their faults are the results of someone else's failings and therefore someone else's problem.
And while it might seem to defeat the purpose by saying it is not entirely the offender's fault that they believe this, Dalrymple asserts that policy makers are largely to blame for creating an excuse-driven, soft on crime environment where – in New Zealand and elsewhere - early guilty pleas, underprivileged childhoods and drug abuse are all legitimate reasons to reduce a prison sentence regardless of the violence of the crime.
"If you believe that because you have had certain experiences in life you can’t be expected to control yourself – then of course you won’t control yourself," he says.
"And if, in addition to all that, you’re actually rewarded for not controlling yourself [or at least there are no penalties] then well, you get the kind of mess that I think we are in."
And while that "we" is based on what he has seen in Britain, the similarities with New Zealand are frighteningly – and perhaps sadly – similar.
"When I first came to New Zealand I was very surprised that your social problems were the same as Britain. I had this notion that it was an idealised place at the bottom of the earth, protected from the world’s corrupting influences."
In a 1998 essay, What Causes Crime (published in his book, Life at the Bottom), Dalrymple ponders the causes of New Zealand’s post-1950's surge in crime. Examining several high-profile cases he concluded of the Peter Ellis sexual abuse affair that "a New Zealand court has given credence to accusations that even the Spanish Inquisition might have found preposterous."
He also suggested our justice system was obsessed with lax enforcement, pleas of mitigation, excuse finding and leniency – "anything but punishment".
It’s the kind of stuff that gets reactions and that, in a nutshell, is why he is here. Sponsored on a nation-wide tour by the Cradle to Jail Coalition (a group made up of social change advocates The Sensible Sentencing Trust, Christine Rankin’s For the Sake of our Children Trust and the Family First Lobby), Dalrymple has both the intellectual clout and international respect required to be noticed.
During a two-week tour which includes a public meeting in Napier on Friday night (Century Theatre 6-8pm tickets $10), the fox is to be invited through the front door of the chicken coop with Dalrymple meeting top government policy makers, MPs, judges and lawyers.
It’s the sort of thing that gets Coalition spokesman and Sensible Sentencing Trust founder Garth McVicar very, very excited.
"Because I’m just a Hawke’s Bay farmer it’s easy for those guys to write us off, but with the standing and respect that Dr Dalrymple has worldwide, his opinions can’t just be discarded and that’s obviously been evident by the interest he’s generated in New Zealand,” says McVicar."
In an unprecedented move, TV3’s Campbell Live devoted Monday night’s entire show to Dalrymple and his controversial views. Overnight an intellectual previously known only among the erudite elite has become the darling of the New Zealand media and Mcvicar says that makes a strong statement about the problems facing the country.
"He probably uses bigger words than most of us but he’s just a very average guy pushing a message that resonates with real New Zealanders who know we can’t continue down this path of social vandalism that we’ve got."
"There are just a small number of policy makers and academics who are driving social policy and not listening to what the public are saying, so I think this is a wake up call for everybody."
With newly released statistics last week showing yet another jump in crime and a recent public uproar over the police’s indulgent treatment of the Kahui family, the timing of the Cradle to Jail tour could not be better. Organisers believe fiercely that the blame lies at the feet of the Government’s soft on crime social policies and in Dalrymple they have a formidable ally.
He believes highly-paid consultants and bureaucrats have infiltrated the government system to the point that – in Britain at least - the tail is wagging the dog.
In an analogy that will have teachers and parents nodding their head in understanding he says even the education system has fallen victim to corporatisation of 'the system'.
We can’t even run a public exam system anymore because we don’t know what the results mean. We are told more and more people are passing exams at a higher grades and yet you meet people who are passing those exams who know absolutely nothing. The whole government apparatus has been corrupted by a form of managerialism so that police, doctors, teachers and all people who work for the government have had their hands tied by procedures and procedural outcomes.
In Britain the police are demoralised and it’s turned into principally a bureaucratic organisation where most people understand that if they are the victim of burglary they call the police not to get it solved but to get insurance.”
The danger of all that, asserts Dalrymple, is that the public is losing faith in the vitally cohesive systems on which a society is built.
"We don’t even believe in our government officials when they’re telling the truth."
"But enough of pointing out the problems. What about the solutions? Sadly, says Dalrymple quoting an American senator, 'you can’t get the hog to slaughter itself'."
Instead, he advocates working from the outside in – steering clear of the official political channels as the Cradle to Jail coalition is doing, to engender change from within.
That, and a return to good old fashioned family values – or family full-stop.
"There are areas in Britain where fatherhood is completely unknown other than in a biological sense. Children are growing up in loveless environments in which they regard all human relationships as a means to an end for their personal gratification of the moment. That is a recipe for a very unpleasant life," says Dalrymple.
And while the solutions might seem insurmountable, they can also be unforgivably easy. In Britain, 50 percent of households no longer have a dining table and that, in Dalrymple’s eyes, is one small way that the rot sets in. People eat when they like with no regard to those around them and with no awareness of what it means to be part of a family.
Worse still, they are allowed to become dependent on welfare and consequently stripped of their self esteem and self determination.
"In this day and age it’s impossible not to be fed, clothed and housed and so there is no achievement in providing for yourself."
"Life on welfare is miserable. It seems to me to be a kind of purgatory in which life looses a lot of meaning because nothing you do makes your life better and yet you’re not deprived of anything. When there’s no meaning people are apt to seek their meaning in social pathology – drugs, drinking and having relationships that are self evidently going to end in disaster because at least disaster is interesting."
It’s a harsh assessment but one that Dalrymple says even the criminals he has worked with acknowledge as being true. Contrary to what one might expect, he has no enemies amongst his former patients and when he met them on the street after their release, they were always pleasant.
While that might simply be because no matter how reformed, most career criminals will never be regular readers of The Spectator, he also maintains that he never writes anything in his articles about criminals that he hasn’t said to their face.
Having a nom de plume also helps – although not among the liberal elite who read his raw and gritty accounts of the long-suffering poor and ask if he makes it all up.
When you habitually work with criminals who have kicked, raped and murdered their way through life such ignorance might seem criminal in itself but Dalrymple has a different view: "you could say they’re rather fortunate".
However as more and more allowances are made for criminals and the results of failed social policy come home to roost, Dalrymple has a warning to those who bury their head in the sand: "If the problem grows, it will find you. Then what will you do?"
British Prison Psychiatrist believes successive NZ Governments have created policies that are killing our children and their futures.
Dr Anthony Daniels (better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple) believes he knows how policies have contributed to appalling crimes like the killing of Chris and Cru Kahui.
He has seen the growth of a dispirited, crime-ridden underclass in Britain and believes NZ is following a similar downward path, as a result of “policies that have given us squalor in the midst of extreme wealth”.
Dalrymple says of politicians, “they are simply limping after a problem they themselves have created”.
His views are formed from many hard years of experience as a prison and hospital psychiatrist dealing with criminals, the impoverished communities and dysfunctional families they came from. He also has extensive experience in Third World countries.
Dalrymple is considered a leading expert on the subject and is being brought to NZ to talk about it by the Cradle to Jail Coalition.
Three high profile trusts have pooled resources and created the coalition to fund Dalrymple’s trip - Sensible Sentencing Trust, For the Sake of our Children Trust and Family First Lobby.
“We’re bringing Theodore out to really elevate the debate, to highlight the folly of policies that have allowed crime against children and by children to escalate. We want to offer solutions that will help bring a stop to the Cradle to Jail crime cycle”, said CTJC Spokesman, Garth McVicar.
“Interest in his visit is already significant people from all backgrounds and areas of interest want to meet, talk and listen to him. By the end of his tour I expect there will be a lot of pressure on politicians to address this issue”.
The CTJ Coalition’s ideal outcome is for clear thinking that will lead to a change of policy direction, with a focus on prevention by addressing factors that keep the cycle turning such as: welfare dependency, child abuse and neglect, education failure, truancy, excuses for and tolerance of youth offending and lenient sentences.
“Dalrymple will challenge people to think and he’ll also suggest solutions. He ’s a reformist with a desire to help rather than politicise and he rejects attempts to place his ideas on a left-right political continuum.”
A New Zealand admirer of Dalrymple is Waitakere City Mayor, Bob Harvey: “He’s an extraordinary thinker and writer.”
Dalrymple, who has visited New Zealand previously, has been closely following events here for several months. Following the killing of the Kahui babies, among scores of babies killed in the last decade, he said to Garth McVicar, “You’re in quite a mess down there, aren’t you?”
The ‘Cradle to Jail’ Campaign runs over 10 days from Monday the 9th of October. Theodore Dalrymple and the CTJ Coalition will tour the country attending a series of public and private functions, speaking with interested and influential people, and doing media interviews including talk back radio.
PUBLIC MEETINGS:
Napier Friday 13th October
Tauranga Tuesday 17th October
Auckland Wednesday 18th October
Garth McVicar is encouraging "anyone who has an interest in our children's future to come along to a public meeting or catch an interview with Dalrymple while he’s here… he has some practical solutions to prevent further escalation in the hideous crime we’re seeing where children are murdered and murdering".
“We are asking politicians be brave, show leadership, have a vision, just do something rather than commission another report that recommends calling for a further report”.
Theodore Dalrymple puts it succinctly:
"To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute."
Background
Theodore Dalrymple writes regular columns for many publications including US-based ‘City Journal’ and Britain’s ‘Spectator’.
More information including the titles of the 14 books he’s written, is available on the Books section of this Website -
Other links
Written interview
Centre for Independent Studies
Wikipedia entry
Essay on suicide bombers
Frontpage Magazine
Essay on welfare and parenting
City Journal
Cradle to Jail Coalition contacts:
SST, Garth McVicar – 027-248-7919
For The Sake Of Our Children, Christine Rankin - 027-582-4804
Family First NZ, Bob McCroskrie – 027-55-555-42
"The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview. " - Theodore Dalrymple