another time, another place

Unsurprisingly, the most horrid of rubbish is circulating through media outlets at the moment with regard to Mamdouh Habib. While I could, at length, take so many of them to task, and further expose both of the major parties for the shortsighted, careless, cave dwellers that they are, I want to very briefly go to what I see as the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter, as I see it, is simply the way that we as a society view and treat offenders, pre and post the determination of their offence.

Even if Habib is guilty of some crime, a crime that is deemed objectionable legally, morally or otherwise, the very plain and simple reality of his case is as follows.

• Pre determination of offence he should have been charged and offered counsel and given the presumption of innocence. Most importantly, his countrymen and countrywomen should have supported him wholeheartedly.
  
  
• Post determination of offence, in a situation where charges were not pressed, he should be free to return to society and to some extent, given the circumstances of his treatment and incarceration, provided with some sort of compensation and apology. Inversely, to round out the point, had he been found guilty of a crime apply the appropriate legislated penalties (not saying I agree with what they might be) but also attempt to understand why the offence was committed in the first place so that we might learn and consequently avoid a potential recurrence.

Of course what really happened pre determination of the offence, and continues to happen post determination of the offence, is a very different story, and a very grim sign, not only for Habib, but for the values and legal system upon which we so heavily rely.

Crime and punishment.

As you may have elicited from the above example, I hold a very unpopular view of crime and punishment, but it is a view that I can not imagine a future without. In brief, I think society should be more focused on why people offend, attempt to empathise with offenders, and from the findings of both of these exercises, attempt to learn how the problems can be addressed at an earlier stage, prior to actual offences taking place.

It stuns me that more people, if not our entire society, can't see that it is better to stop something ever happening than wait until it does and then react, singularly and uselessly.

This is not to say that the solutions are necessarily within reach or trivial to implement. Far from it. But if we do not make a start, what are we to expect of times to come? If you do not get to the root of a plague like terrorism or the more everyday crimes and triggers of pedophilia, rape, rage, alcoholism and drug abuse, to name but a few, you condone life after life to immeasurable trauma. It's just that simple an equation.

Unfortunately, fear, our favourite emotion, plays such a big part in our everyday lives now we are quite blind to anything other than surviving. It's just so much easier to want people locked up with fantastic, headline raising, sentences. Easier to be quite pleased when police shoot someone that was coming at them with a bottle, after all, it could have been you they threatened. Easier to have America lock up anyone that might remotely be a chance to hijack a plane you might be on.

Of course it's all bullshit, and if you buy into it you've just been played by a whole lot of people you don't even know the names of.

And that is the story of the noughties and the reason why for now my views will remain just my views, not legislated progression.