Man kan også vælge at tænke selv og i øvrigt let selv konstatere, at det sjovt nok er de forbrydelser som straffes hårdest og i øvrigt efterforskes mere grundigt, der er de færreste af. Lige som et land der straffer mildt og har relativt meget få betjente som Sverige, har en eksplosiv udvikling i kriminalitet og har EUs føretrøje i kriminalitet.
New York halveringen af kriminalitet, er de naturligvis ikke begejstrede for, da den strider mod deres SOCIALKONSTRUKTIVISTISKE tilgang, da denne på umenneskelig vis har elementer af strengere straffe og mere politi, samt desuden nægter at betragte forbryderen som et offer.
Men tilfældet Sverige, som må være deres teori nogenlunde omsat til praksis, hvor forbryderne er ofre som skal hjælpes mildt på ret kurs, oplever ikke alene en fordobling, vi taler en mangedobling:
I Sverige er den grove kriminalitet mere end firdoblet siden 1970erne, mens den er halveret i New York siden halvfjerdserne, for voldelige forbrydelser ser udviklingen sådan her ud i New York, sammenlignet med andre storbyer i USA:
Og sådan her ser det ud i Sverige:
Hvordan de så lige vil forklare den forskel, det er jo så spørgsmålet, men at man straffer grove forbrydelser hårdt, betyder ikke nødvendigvis "amerikanske tilstande" alá three strikes and you are out, eller fængsel for stofbesiddelse og en kæmpeandel af befolkningen bag tremmer.
Det er rigeligt at straffe vold og røverier hårdt og øge opklaringsprocenten på indbrud og andre irriterende forbrydelser, det skal nok give resultater og angiveligt kun en overgangsfase med propfyldte fængsler.
At man så bør overveje en fordobling af straffen af gentagne grove forbrydelser og ikke lade personer der har personfarlig afvigende adfærd gå frit og ubehandlet omkring ifølge min opfattelse er en anden sag. Alle kan i princippet komme galt afsted, men gentagne tilfælde af kriminalitet er en personlighedsfejl og et tegn på manglende moral, derfor bør straffen takseres højere for gentagne og hyppige forbrydelser, igen og igen.
Theodore Dalrymple, fængselspsykiater med mange års erfaring med kriminelle, hudfletter en gang platmarxisme:
Academic criminologists would rather be mugged than admit that policing caused New York’s crime turnaround.
During a brief lull during a clinic recently, I picked up a copy of a journal called Theoretical Criminology that the publishers had sent me in the hope of enticing me to subscribe. One article almost caused me to suffer apoplexy: “Theorizing policing: The drama and myth of crime control in the NYPD,” written by Peter K. Manning, a professor of Policing and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.
Professor Manning’s attitude to criminal justice was as simple as Calvin Coolidge’s to sin: he was against it. And as far as Manning was concerned, fear of crime was a mere middle-class neurosis, used to justify the oppression of minorities, the poor, and social misfits. Indeed, crime doesn’t really exist: for, as Manning put it, “Crime is a context-based idea, not a thing; it is a representation, a word, a symbol, standing for many things, including vague fears, symbolic villains, threats and assailants, the unknown, generalized anxieties and hopes.”
For Manning, changes in crime rates have nothing to do with the policing or criminal justice system, to the study (or is it to the abolition?) of which he has presumably devoted his life: hence his contemptuous denial that a change in policing could have been even partially responsible for the drastic decline of crime in New York during Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoralty. Crime, he says, is far too complex a social phenomenon for the likes of mere mayors and policemen to understand: presumably it requires further research by professors to elucidate the delicate causative web that extends back to the Garden of Eden, if not beyond. In the meantime, we must patiently submit to be being burgled, mugged, or assaulted, because the criminologists will eventually come to our rescue: though, as in St. Augustine’s prayer that he might be good, not just yet.
The logical conclusion of Manning’s argument is that, if neither the police nor the courts existed, we should be none the less safe, or any the more unsafe. Even for a tenured professor, this conclusion must be hard to swallow. Manning is by no means a lone voice crying in the criminological wilderness: on the contrary, he is more like a member of a powerful chorus singing in unison. One of the most prominent recent books on the subject, Bernard Harcourt’s The Illusion of Order, also claims that the decline in crime in New York during the 1990s had little or nothing to do with policing, and that “disorder” is a social construction. That is to say, the smell of urine is in the nose of the olfactor.
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