A little harsh maybe, but I still laughed.

Like catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, fusion as a viable commercial source of energy has been just ten years away for the last fifty years. But this article from phys.org about research at the JET gives reason to hope commercial fusion really is getting closer. I would be pleased to see it in my lifetime.

Climate scientist Dr Judith Curry has published an analysis of the extraordinary judgement against Mark Steyn, who described MIchael Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick as fraudulent. The court ordered Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages.

I have followed this discussion and the court case for years. When you are a major public figure and media influencer, as Steyn is, you really do need to be careful in the language you use. It is fine to crtiticise ideas and theories, and fine to ask where people got their data, and how the data was interpreted. It is fine to come to a different conclusion. Describing something as fraudulent, however, implies dishonesty – misrepresentation of data and deliberate deception.

In this case, though, it is clear there really was misrepresentation of data and deliberate deception. Read Dr Curry’s article and see what you think.

How is it that the current president of the United States has been found incompetent to stand trial because of memory and cognitive issues, but is absolutely 100% fine to run the most powerful country on the planet?

Brian Wilson posted this on Instagram about four hours ago. I am sad to hear this news. If you haven’t seen the movie Love and Mercy, take the time to watch it. It has music and drama, and is a moving true-life (and lasting) romance.

“My heart is broken. Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning.

Our five children and I are just in tears.

We are lost.

Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior.

She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career.

She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart.

She was my anchor. She was everything for us. Please say a prayer for her.

Love and Mercy

Brian”

Bad news overwhelms us, the future looks grim. The media tells us “Be worried. Be scared.”

In reality, most people are safer, healthier, and better off than at any previous time in Earth’s history.

“Have we just lived through one of the best years in human history? As we look at 2023 through the rearview mirror, I think that’s a defensible claim. In fact, the same thing could have been said at the end of pretty much every year since the beginning of the millennium (with the exception of the disastrous pandemic years of 2020 and 2021). Never before have so many people lived in affluence, safety, and good health.

And yet, it doesn’t feel that way. There’s so much horror and misery in the world—look at the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen alone—that it is hard to believe that, on average, this past year was probably the best year ever. So, if life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?

One culprit is the media. Every good editor knows that “if it bleeds, it leads.” If the newspapers only focus on awful things and ignore all the good stuff, is it any wonder that people end up believing that the world is going down the drain?”

Read more at Quillette. The Seven Laws of Pessimism.

I have had a long-standing interest in justice and criminology. This has been expressed in reading and conversation, and in my roles as a police and emergency services chaplain, and as a prison visitor. I am also fortunate to have a spectacularly brainy sister who is a research psychologist, and whose area of interest is the prompting/motivating/enabling factors for criminal behaviour, and the prediction and prevention of recidivism.

This year I begin formal studies in criminology at Griffith University, Australia’s most highly rated university for criminology and justice studies.

I have done some preliminary reading: a popular Australian textbook – Crime and Criminology (White, Haines, Asquith 7th Ed 2023), Realist Criminology (Matthews, 2014), Rehabilitation (Ward and Maruna 2007), Selected articles from the Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety (ed Nick Tilley 2005), Conservative Criminology (Wright and DeLisi 2016), More God, Less Crime (Johnson 2011), Criminology: A Very Short Introduction (Newburn 2018), and multiple articles on the causes of crime, as well as rehabilitation, victim impact, and recidivism. I am currently working through the Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice (Deckert and Sarre, eds, 2017). Except for the first and last, possibly none of these would be chosen as suitable texts by academic criminologists in Australia, but I have tried to give myself a balanced range of viewpoints.

Criminology is not a discipline in its own right. There is no specific and definable body of knowledge, as there is in medicine or geology. Nor is there a set of finely honed skills, as there is in physiotherapy or welding. Instead, criminology is a multi-disciplinary investigation of a fairly narrow group of questions and issues. These include:

• What is crime?
• What causes crime?
• Who commits crime and why?
• What is the impact of crime on victims?
• What is the impact of crime on communities?
• How should society respond to crime?
• an crime be prevented? How?
• Can incarcerated offenders be rehabilitated? If so, what works?

These are worthwhile questions. The cost of crime in Australia is horrendous. Taking into account direct loss of property through theft or damage, the cost of policing, the judiciary, corrections, the cost of security and insurance, and loss of time at work, the financial cost is about $5,000 per year for every man, woman and child in Australia. That is a huge brake on the economy. In addition, and just as importantly, there is the personal and emotional impact of crime on victims, families and communities.

By providing clear, evidence-based answers to the questions above, criminologists could make a significant contribution to building a safer and more prosperous society. There is certainly some interesting research and reporting going on. See, for example, this list of featured articles from the British Journal of Criminology, all of which are free to read: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/pages/featured

The Journal of Criminology, which, while international in scope, focuses on Australian and New Zealand research, features some similarly useful work: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/anj

However, while some worthwhile studies are being done, criminologists in these journals are mostly talking to each other. That is the case for most professional journals. The difference in criminology is that there does not seem to be a lot of listening.

Where criminologists respond to books or papers, they frequently seem to do so by creating a parody version of views they do not hold, and then demolishing the parody they have created. This may be easy and amusing, but it does not contribute to the growth of knowledge, and encourages others; policy-makers and corrective services workers, for example, and perhaps more critical new students like myself, to doubt the practical value of academic criminology.

As an example, the first book I mentioned, Crime and Criminology, takes a dim view of anything that could be called a conservative outlook. Conservatives, we are told, believe the function of law and politics to be the preservation of the status quo (pg 10), divide society into them – bad people, and us – virtuous people (pg 136), believe humans are inherently evil, or at least irreparably flawed, justifying severe punishments on those who misbehave, stir people into a “moral panic” in order to implement stricter punishment of offenders (pg 91),  and pay little or no attention to social causes of crime and differences in background or ability of offenders.

Gosh, what a scurrilous bunch those conservatives are. Not to mention holding views like climate change denial, which should be made a crime (pg 109). I will forego discussing the nature of societies which criminalise opinions they do not like.

Perhaps this is an opportune moment to mention that the only political party I have ever belonged to was the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyite group whose values I shared quite fervently when at university in my early twenties. Since then I have had friends in every major political party, and in every major religion represented in Australia. I have shaken hands with Peter Lewis, whom I considered a good friend, with Meg Lees, Alexander Downer, Peter Beatty and with Andrew Bolt, and had conversations with all of them and many others. I know a lot of conservatives. I know nobody who holds the beliefs ascribed to them by White, Haines and Asquith.

Conservatives do not believe the function of law and politics to be the maintenance of the status quo. Many of them, as I do, have friends or family members who have been imprisoned, and do not remotely divide the world into good people like us, and criminals who deserve what they get. They do not believe legitimate concern about crime, especially in poorer, higher crime areas, should simply written off as “moral panic.” While holding firmly to the view that people are responsible for their own moral choices, they also take seriously the role of financial hardship, poor parenting, resentment, unemployment, drug abuse, and other factors which increase the likelihood of crime, try to understand and ameliorate them, and maintain the right of the judiciary to take circumstances and personal differences into account in sentencing.

Conservatives, of course, are not immune from mistakes, in criminology or any other policy area. GK Chesterton, one of my favourite authors, wrote (Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924): “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

I have pointed out in other circumstances that if you need to misrepresent your opponents’ beliefs in order to make your point, this is a clear indicator that you don’t have a point to make. The purpose of debate and discussion, whether at home, in Parliament, or in academia, should always be to find the truth, and having found it, or as close an approximation as we can humanly obtain, to use that truth as the basis for policy. This means genuinely listening, stating your opponents’ views clearly and fairly, and having positive regard even for people with whom you disagree vehemently.

Criminology is about real life, real people, real costs, and real harm. With fair and open discussion, it can also be about real hope.

Nicholas J. Cepeda, who calls himself Melody Wiseheart and is a York University professor of behavioral science, identifies as a teen girl, and competes against 13 and 14 year old girls.

“Girls from age eight to 16 in a Swimming Canada-sanctioned swim meet in Barrie last week not only found themselves in the same pool as a transgender female swimmer but in the same changeroom, too,” the paper reported on Dec. 7th.

“Parents confirmed that the person in question changed in and out of a swimsuit in the women’s locker room at the East Bayfield Community Centre during the Dec. 1 Trojan Cup,” the reporting continued.

That “person” was Nicholas Cepeda.

“The girls were terrified,” one parent recalled.

“It’s all so confusing for the kids,” another parent added. “No one is comfortable. Everybody is accepting of all people but them swimming against our kids and being in the locker room with them is not appropriate.”

“We have no idea why it is allowed,” a third parent said. “We know it’s not fair to the girls who are training at their sport and some of whom are hoping for scholarships.”

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.” Jonathan Swift, 1710

If you care about the truth, check everything.

It is almost ten years since this incisive, but little-read essay appeared on the Imaginative Conservative website:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot’s Modern Education and the Classics, published in 1934, complements C. S. Lewis’s own ‘Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English’ which was the sub-title of Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. Both works insist that education cannot be divorced from morality and that the latter must inform the former. Similarly Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) dovetail with Lewis’s position as regards the necessity of Christianity to any genuine restoration of European culture. Most notably, Eliot’s depiction of ‘The Hollow Men’ in his poem of that title, published in 1925, prefigures Lewis’s ‘Men without Chests’ in The Abolition of Man who are fictionalized to great satirical effect in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the latter of which contains a delightful parody of the disintegration and dumbing-down of the modern academy.

Now go read the rest…

Yes, it looks good, but…

Interesting. The same questions could be asked of both Australian and US armed forces. New Zealand, a former worthy ally, now has armed forces that might be useful for an afternoon of picking mushrooms, but not much more. From the valuable Conservative Woman website:

LAST week, while our only two aircraft carriers were moored in Portsmouth, the RAF sent four aging Typhoons via Cyprus to bomb Houthis in the hope of giving HMS Diamond a break from shooting down Iranian-made drones. They attacked in conjunction with the US Navy and, while they probably gave the Houthis a bit of a headache, they inadvertently revealed the appalling state of the armed forces.

The Red Sea is a vital shipping lane with some 10 to 15 per cent of world trade passing through it. The west has long had forces in the area and the nearby Persian Gulf to ensure freedom of the seas and the ready availability of hydrocarbons. Every once in a while those who hate the west, or Israel, or both, seek to interdict such trade. The producer states do it via OPEC and pricing, Iran with missiles and guns. Iran in the Houthis now has a proxy that can threaten a wider range of goods – most oil tankers don’t fit into the Suez Canal. Most liquid natural gas carriers and container ships do. The UK has had ships stationed in and about the area throughout my lifetime.

The Red Sea threat is such that Maersk, Hapag Lloyd and now Qatar Energy are routing vessels via Cape Good Hope. That adds about nine days to the journey time and thus costs will rise as more vessels are at sea for longer. According to Reuters traffic through the canal is down 30 per cent. 

That’s why some 20 countries have joined the United States in Operation Prosperity Guardian. The name says it all really; even the EU is muttering about sending support despite having no military organisation. Of course the UK could opt out, but we need the LNG for energy security and we have to justify our seat on the security council. Fortunately for the UK we have just the sort of ship needed and it happens to be there. Diamond is a Type 45 anti-air destroyer capable of shooting down all the missiles in the Houthi arsenal.

Those missiles range from indigenously produced Samad drones (also being used by Russia in Ukraine) through to Chinese copies of the Exocet (the missile that sank HMS Sheffield in the Falklands war) to simple ballistic missiles. At around 8,500 tons HMS Diamond and similar warships are much smaller than the 160,000 ships which  transit the Suez Canal, and might well survive a hit – unless they are an LNG carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier Diamond and the other warships also protect against Houthi gunboats as they have anti-ship weaponry too. If they withdrew the Houthis would have free range.

The problem however is the logistics and expense of shooting $1.5million Sea Viper missiles at $20,000 drones. The availability of these missiles is constrained – Diamond carries 48. Some time soon they’ll need replenishment. Thus it becomes sensible to destroy the launchers, hence the air strikes.

The US can recruit sailors, and thus used its carrier in the Indian Ocean. The RAF sent four of its older Typhoons from (or via) Cyprus. They had to rely heavily on the US for airborne early warning and control (AWACS) because the RAF got rid of its AWACS in 2021 and the replacement hasn’t turned up yet. £20billion or so of combat aircraft are pretty much useless for anything more than airshows unless we are working in a coalition with someone who does have AWACS. Add that to the £10billion of uncrewed carriers and it’s hard not to conclude that the MoD is in disarray. 

For once this is not a money problem – since 2019 the defence budget has increased 20 per cent in real terms, thanks largely to the previous Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Unfortunately, as Grant Shapps is finding, spending may have gone up but capability has diminished. We’re throwing good money after bad.

The Navy can’t crew its warships, or even find a retired admiral. The Army has the same number of soldiers as the Cold War British Army of the Rhine yet delivers just 20 per cent of the combat power. As I’ve said, the RAF has no AWACS and even the Red Arrows struggle to field sufficient aircraft to put on a show.

Worse, recruitment has collapsed and indiscipline is rife. Even the famed SAS have problems with some of their number moving into the drugs trade. All this is a sign of failed leadership. 

How to fix it? Good question. Firstly all parties need to accept that there is a problem and that it is their fault because it happened on their watch. Then we must find the people to fix it, which is unlikely to include many in the upper echelons of the Armed Forces.  Who is going to drive reform through?

Can it be done? The British Armed Forces are not yet in the desperate state that the Americans were after Vietnam. They recovered from a drug-ridden laughing stock to a formidable fighting machine in a little over a decade. But the challenge to rearm physically and morally is still formidable.

In 2003, based on my various roles as Police Chaplain, prison visitor, and parish priest, and with some experience in youth advocacy, I was invited to participate in a meeting with a young offender. In a police interview this offender had confessed that, in company with another seventeen year old whom he declined to name, he had broken into a home belonging to an older couple. The home had been chosen because the couple had a regular routine which made it easy to predict when they would not be home. In addition, the offenders believed the couple could easily be overpowered if they did return home unexpectedly.

It had been suggested to the offender that if he was willing to meet with the victims, and express repentance and a willingness to make amends, this might make a difference to sentencing. This was described to me as “restorative justice.” It was a process, I was told, that was victim-centred.

Social workers and the offender’s solicitor had not been willing to supply me with any details about exactly what the offenders had done in the couple’s home. Police were more forthcoming. I was able to meet with the couple at their home prior to the scheduled meeting with the offender.

He and his companion had defecated on the lounge room carpet, urinated on furniture, pulled paintings and photographs from the wall, destroyed personal property including items that had been gifts at the couple’s wedding forty years previously, and stolen cash, cards and a few items of jewellery. The couple were on an age pension and did not have contents insurance. They had been left to clean up the mess as best they could. There were stains on the carpet, and there was still a distinct and unpleasant odour in the home. They explained that they no longer felt safe in their home, but had nowhere else to go. They could not afford to replace carpets or furniture. Some items; photos of family now deceased, paintings, glassware and porcelain which had been wedding gifts, and jewellery including the woman’s engagement ring, which had not been recovered, were not replaceable.

The couple did not wish to meet with, see, or talk to the offender. But they had been told that they might reach some “closure” by explaining to him the hurt they had suffered, and listening to him talk about his background and why he done what he had done, and to an expression of remorse. If they felt able to offer him forgiveness, they were told, that would be good for them and him.

During the preparatory meeting, at which the couple were not present, the offender asked what the meeting was for. The social worker explained that this was to help him prepare for his meeting with the couple whose home he had broken into, to give him ideas about what he should say.

O.        (offender) Oh yeah. So I should say, like, I’m sorry.

SW.     (social worker) Yes, that’s right. But you have to look sorry too.

PW.    (me) Are you sorry?

O looks at social worker for reassurance. Social worker nods.

O.        Oh yeah. For real.

PW.    What would you do if someone broke into your parent’s house and did what you did?

O.        I live with me mum.

PW.    OK, so if someone broke into your mum’s house and did what you did?

O.        I’d kill the cunt.

PW.    So you know what you did was wrong. You know that it caused harm, and you are willing to make amends?

O.        Yeah

PW.     Does that mean you are happy to pay to get their carpets replaced, to buy them new furniture, and to co-operate with police in apprehending your companion and getting the couple’s jewellery back?

O, horrified expression on his face, looks at the social worker.

SW.     Ah, no, no. That’s not what this is about. It’s about achieving a better outcome for the victims, and for O.

Restorative justice claims to be an alternative to retributive justice. Instead of identifying and punishing offenders, it is victim-centred and focussed on remedying harm and on reconciliation. Despite the fact that restorative justice claims to be victim-centred, I could not see at the time, and still do not see, how any part of that process was directed at achieving a better outcome for the victims. What exactly was being restored to them?

A clarification may be needed at this point. This paper is particularly concerned with restorative justice in the context of crime and responses to crime. There are other contexts in which it is sometimes suggested the philosophy and processes of restorative justice may be applied, for example, in schools and workplaces. Those situations are not part of this discussion, although they will be mentioned briefly later.

There are various ways of understanding what constitutes a crime. These include the view that a crime is any action that is defined as a crime by law or custom in a particular jurisdiction. Alternatively, a crime is something that everyone in a particular culture recognises is wrong and deserving of punishment. Or a society may hold some combination of these views, for example, that there are some crimes that are crimes because they are obviously wrong (eg, rape), while others are crimes because they are defined as such in common law or legislation (eg, possession of marijuana). The nature of crime may also be understood through theoretical or philosophical frameworks such as class struggle or feminism.

What all of these definitions have in common is that crimes are actions (or sometimes failures to act) in which the community as a whole takes an interest. They are not taken simply to be the private actions of persons which concern only themselves, or even the actions of one person  against another, but actions which cause harm to the community. This is so even when the action is indeed at first sight that of one person against another, for example, when a drunken party-goer punches a stranger in the head outside a nightclub.

The view of almost all societies, from tribal groups to modern industrial states, is that when any member of the community is grievously harmed, the whole community is harmed. This means the whole community has an interest and is involved, whether directly, or through a delegated group,  or by proxy through police and courts, in understanding what happened, in taking suitable action to remedy the harm done, in punishing offenders, and in preventing further harm from occurring.

The justice system in any society, however differently expressed, is the structures and processes which, when a crime has occurred, enable a society to:

• Identify what has happened including events, perpetrators, victims, and harm done.
• Remedy the harm if possible
• Punish offenders
• Prevent further harm from occurring

These structures and processes are not, and cannot be, successful in every detail and at every time. It may not be possible to ascertain every detail of a crime, or every perpetrator, or all the harm that was done. It may not be possible, even with rehabilitation programmes or an extended period of incarceration, to prevent criminals from offending again. The priority given to each aspect of these processes may vary according to culture, government policy, public opinion, or fashions in philosophy or social practice.

Restorative justice is sometimes described as an alternative to retributive justice. Retributive justice, we are told, focuses on punishment of offenders. Restorative justice seeks to arrive at a consensus about how best to remedy harm and restore relationships.

But this dichotomy is misleading. No modern liberal democracy has a justice system whose primary focus is retribution. On the other hand, there is little evidence that restorative justice, at least in the setting of criminal justice, is in practice victim-centred or primarily concerned with remedying harm and genuine restoration.

In fact, for many victims, not only is nothing restored in restorative justice, but their experiences of loss and pain are glossed over in a process which seems designed to benefit not them, but the offender. John Braithwaite noted (British Journal of Criminology 2002 42 pg 570) “We actively seek to persuade participants that they ought to listen respectfully, but we do not urge them to forgive.” The first thing that comes to mind here is that it is an astonishing dismissal or belittling of victim’s experiences, or at least a gross  lack of sensitivity, to suggest to a woman who has been raped that she ought to listen respectfully while the man who violated her speaks, or to a man whose child has been murdered that he owes a duty to the murderer to be silent while the murderer talks about his feelings.

Regardless of Braithwaite’s assertion to the contrary, many victims do feel coerced into participating, and pressured  into expressing forgiveness. Braithwaite’s own views about this are expressed more revealingly in the paper Principles of Restorative Justice:  “… if a victim rejects an apology, choosing to hate, the ideal is that the conference empowers them to do so… ” These are the options, apparently – forgive, or be a hater. Although restorative justice conferences make declining to forgive an option, this is regarded as indicative of personal failure, vindictiveness or weakness. This is very far from being victim-centred.

Being the victim of a crime does not create any obligation to the perpetrator of the crime. Apart from the duty to be truthful, a victim owes nothing to a person who has violated their property or person. That includes participation in programmes designed to produce better outcomes for the offender.

It is sometimes claimed that restorative justice reduces recidivism and, by offering an alternative path to traditional judicial procedures, reduces incarceration. This, it is suggested, is not only a benefit to offenders and society, but also to victims, since the changes in thinking and behaviour in offenders engendered by the restorative justice process mean fewer offences committed and therefore fewer victims. But there are at least three issues with these claims.

First, even if these claims were true, they do not make restorative justice victim-centred. Victims of crime are not simply part of some anonymous conglomeration whose harms, needs, and interests can be treated as if they were a single object. They are individual human beings. A possible marginal benefit for victims as a whole is not the same thing as, and may even be opposed to, caring for and meeting the needs of a particular victim.

Second, there is very little evidence that restorative justice does reduce recidivism and incarceration rates. There are many studies which claim it does, but the credibility of these is impaired by small sample size, poor study design, deficient analysis, and the remarkable co-incidence that in almost every instance, researchers find exactly the results they are hoping to find.

Finally, where restorative justice practices have been implemented within the criminal justice system, they are implemented in addition to, and not as an alternative to, normal courtroom and sentencing procedures. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise, since once a crime is demonstrated to have been committed, the prosecution of the alleged offender rests with the relevant government authority, not with the victim. This is because, as explained above, part of the definition of a crime is that it is a harm so serious that the whole society considers itself to have been harmed. Despite the interminable frippery of American law and order TV programmes, there is no such thing as a victim deciding “not to press charges.” The broader community has been harmed, and the broader community decides the action to be taken.

Restorative justice conferences inevitably add an extra layer of bureaucracy to an already expensive and for many people, confusing and over-long process, while adding nothing of value.

In democracies where rule of law is taken seriously, understandings of what is just are moulded by the values of the community. Different groups in society may have different views about what acts or omissions should be considered crimes, the threshold for delineating crimes and torts, and what is the appropriate response to particular crimes. In a state which takes representation seriously, all of these perspectives will go into the mix of ideas that eventually coalesces into legislation, regulation or policy. This is part of what democracy means.

Regardless of how distasteful it may be to some academics, most people believe a measure of punishment is appropriate in at least some criminal cases. Where offenders have used sexual violence against children, where vulnerable people to whom every cent matters are cheated out of income or savings, where a family is murdered, or in instances similar to the one I described at the beginning of this paper, most kind and reasonable people will insist that punishment is called for. More than this, they believe that a failure to punish is a failure to act justly. Refusal to punish perpetrators of serious crime is injustice to victims.

This does not mean that ordinary citizens or victims of crime are vindictive. In most people’s view, it would be wrong for offenders who cause grievous harm to suffer no consequences. Those consequences, however, are not simply retributive. They are to be purposeful.

The purposes of consequences imposed by society for criminal acts may be summarised under the following headings:

• Protection of society against further offences for the duration of any incarceration.
• To deter those tempted to criminal acts, and to deter criminals from reoffending.
• To rehabilitate prisoners: to model respectful and positive thinking and behaviour, and to offer classes and programmes to give prisoners skills for life.

Restitution is sometimes added to this list. Restitution via incarceration is the theory that prisoners are paying their debt to society by being imprisoned. This is clearly nonsense. A criminal does not pay his debt to society by costing society $250 per day ($400 per day if capital and maintenance costs are included) to keep him in prison.

Consequences imposed by courts for criminal acts are not imposed randomly. Within guidelines and accustomed practice, they are adjusted for particular circumstances including the severity of the crime and offender’s background including prior offending.

This makes it clear that even if restorative justice really was victim-centred and focussed on restoration, restorative justice and retributive justice are not the only two possible options. The dichotomy between restorative justice and retributive justice claimed by restorative justice proponents should be rejected.

In recent years, restorative justice has been suggested as an effective method of bringing about reconciliation in schools and workplaces. Conferences between bullies and the bullied in schools, for example, can help to bring about a deeper understanding of the situation and feelings of victims by the bullies, and encourage them to apologise, take responsibility and amend their thinking and behaviour. In a similar way, conferences in the workplace between those whose work has been claimed by a workmate, or who have been the victims of unfair discrimination, can restore relationships, and set the stage for more positive, open, and productive workplaces. However, this is no more than appropriating to the cause of restorative justice, practices which are well-established common-sense conflict resolution and behaviour management techniques.

Even in schools and workplaces, explicit introduction of restorative justice does not seem to bring about any positive change. Some research shows that replacing school disciplinary procedures with restorative justice conferences has a negative impact on student behaviour and academic outcomes, while the same practice in the workplace leads to more lost time and victims feeling less safe and less satisfied with the outcome of disputes.

Provisions for restitution in some tribal and ancient civilisation legal codes are also sometimes claimed by restorative justice proponents as precursors of contemporary restorative justice practices. In fact they are simply evidence that remedying harm has been part of most justice systems, at most times, in most parts of the world.

Theory is important. When based on careful, objective research, it can give new insights, make useful predictions, and help set priorities for practice. The most important question for criminological theory, for justice, and for offender rehabilitation is “What works?” Restorative justice does not work. It offers no benefits or solutions in practice. Nothing is restored. Like Marxism, restorative justice theory is a failed coagulation of idealism and coercion. It is time it was discarded.

Amazing! Who would have thought that actual teaching helps with actual learnng? Incredible…

When Jehovah’s Witnesses come to your door, they may offer you a pamphlet, compliment your house or garden, and ask if they can come in to share some important news about the Bible. Whether you say yes or no, they are then likely to launch into a memorised script about one or all of three things. These are:

“Did you know that all modern translations of the Bible are inaccurate?”

“Did you know Jesus wasn’t crucified but put on a stake?”

“Did you know that the churches have deliberately removed the name of God (Jehovah) from the Bible?”

The media delight in portraying the Church as shifty and hypocritical, and most people are aware that there are many different translations of Scripture, so these questions may echo thoughts that are in peoples’ minds already. We will certainly meet people who have been confused by the JWs, and we should know enough about JW teachings to be able to reassure them. Christians should also look on visits from JWs and others, as evangelism opportunities. But this means we need to be prepared!

Truth cannot be decided on the basis of a majority decision. But it is important to remember that the JW’s ideas are rejected by highly qualified men and women from every kind of Christian and academic background.

There is substantial agreement between all mainstream denominations about how the Scriptures should be translated. The differences between modern translations are in most cases simply differences of emphasis or style. For example the Good News Bible is written in simple English and uses a limited vocabulary, the NIV tries to translate fluidly, phrase for phrase, while the RSV adheres as closely as possible to the word order and sense of the original languages.

The JW’s translation, the “New World Translation” stands completely outside the context of any serious academic study. Here are quotes from just a few well-known scholars:

• Dr. Bruce M. Metzger, professor of New Testament at Princeton University, calls the NWT “a frightful mistranslation,” “Erroneous” and “pernicious” “reprehensible” “If the Jehovah’s Witnesses take this translation seriously, they are polytheists.”

• Dr. William Barclay, a leading Greek scholar, said “It is abundantly clear that a sect which can translate the New Testament like that is intellectually dishonest.”

• British scholar H.H. Rowley stated, “From beginning to end this volume is a shining example of how the Bible should not be translated.”

• Dr. Julius Mantey, author of A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament, calls the NWT “A shocking mistranslation.” “I have never read any New Testament so badly translated as The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of The Greek Scriptures…. it is a distortion not a translation.” “It is neither scholarly nor reasonable to translate John 1:1 ‘The Word was a god.”” (Julius Mantey, Depth Exploration in The New Testament (N.Y.: Vantage Pres, 1980), pp.136-137). Dr Mantey also described the JW translators as ‘diabolical deceivers.’

All of this sounds harsh, but it should hardly be surprising. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded by Charles Taze Russell, a draper from Pittsburgh. Russell claimed to be an expert in the translation of the Scriptures, but could not even recognise the letters of the Greek or Hebrew alphabets. Subsequent Jehovah’s Witness “translators” have had little greater knowledge.

Chief translator (and later president of the JWs) Fred Franz had studied Greek for two years at the University of Cincinnati (he never graduated), but was ‘self-taught’ in Hebrew. Asked in a Scottish courtroom if he could provide a translation of Genesis chapter two verse four, Franz said he could not. His explanation of the process of writing the New World Translation was that God “passed them to the Holy Spirit who, invisible, communicates with Jehovah’s Witnesses – and the publicity department.” Fred Franz ran the publicity department at the time.

This information is from the book Crisis of Conscience by Raymond Franz, Fred’s nephew and a former member of the governing body of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It is simply not true that all modern translations of the Bible are inaccurate. We have manuscripts of most books of the Bible which date back to within two hundred years of the life of Jesus. There is wide consensus amongst Christian and non-Christian academics and translators about how these manuscripts should be translated. And we have hundreds of letters and sermons from the early, pre-Constantine, Church which show us exactly what was taught and believed from the earliest days.

Even in the absence of this overwhelming evidence, mere common sense would tell us that it cannot be true that after nearly 2,000 years Jehovah’s Witnesses alone have discovered the truth. This would mean that every teacher and preacher from the time of the Apostles was wrong in understanding who Jesus is, and that God allowed a complete distortion of the Gospel to be proclaimed everywhere until Mr Russell, and subsequently “Judge” Rutherford came along to put everyone right.

If nothing else, the JW’s history of failed predictions would show that their interpretation of Scripture is not to be trusted. Deuteronomy 18:22 says “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken.”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses claimed Jesus had returned in 1873, and that this would be made manifest in 1914. Sorry, 1915. Well, 1918 then. No, we made a mistake, it’s 1920, when the advertising slogan “Millions Now Living Will Never Die!” was first used. Definitely 1925. OK, 1975. Or maybe not …

What of the claim that Jesus was not crucified, but hung on a stake? JWs base this claim on the fact that in classical Greek the word “stauros”, translated “cross” in the New Testament, means stake, and only stake. They will sometimes argue that well-known Christian scholars like Westcott and Hort support this view. But this is not true. No one disputes that in the Greek of Homer, “stauros” usually meant stake. But the New Testament was written some six to eight hundred years after Homer. The Greek of the New Testament (Koiné, or common Greek), is different in a number of ways from classical Greek, and many words, including stauros, have changed or broadened in meaning. We only have to consider the changes in the English language over time to understand how this happens. Words in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or even in Shakespeare, do not always mean the same thing they mean now.

We know that stauros can and does mean cross in other examples of Koiné literature from New Testament times. Early Christian art (and even Roman graffiti mocking Christians) shows Jesus on a cross. Roman writers, writing in Latin, talk of Jesus having been crucified. We know from archaeology and written records that crucifixion, not impaling or hanging on a stake, was a common Roman punishment. There has never been any dispute about the fact that Jesus was crucified. To suggest that after 2,000 years the JWs suddenly discovered the truth about this, a truth unknown even to those who were there, is ludicrous in the extreme.

But isn’t it true that the name Jehovah has been removed from the Bible? Mostly yes, because Jehovah is not the name of God. It is a spelling mistake by medieval Bible translators.

The Massoretes or Jewish scribes who kept and copied the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) invented a system of dots and other symbols to show where the vowels should go. This made reading Hebrew a lot easier, because originally Hebrew was written without vowels and with the words all running together. Ycnshwdffcltthswldhvmdttrd (You can see how difficult this would have made it to read).

The name of God, usually written YHWH, was too holy to be pronounced. The practice in synagogue when reading aloud was to say the word ‘adonaï’ – ‘Lord’. So whenever YHWH appears in Hebrew, the Massoretes wrote the vowels for adonai, indicating that this was what the reader should say. Early Bible translators didn’t know this, and mixed up the consonants YHWH with the vowels of Adonai and came up with the nonsense word Jehovah.

We don’t know with any certainty how the name of God was pronounced (perhaps Yahweh or more probably Yahu) so most modern translations follow the Jewish scribes and write LORD, the capital letters indicating that this stands in place of the divine name.

Finally, JWs will sometimes claim that their beliefs are shown to be true by the fact that they live upstanding lives, that there is no dishonesty or abuse in their congregations. But is this true?

In 1914 Charles T. Russell sued The Brooklyn Daily Eagle for libel when the paper exposed him for fraudulent attempts to sell ordinary wheat at the then extraordinary price of $60 per bushel claiming it was “Miracle Wheat”, and claimed that his religious activities were a money-making front. Russell lost this case in court.

Earlier he had sued a Baptist minister, J.J. Ross for publishing an article that claimed Russell mistranslated the bible throughout, had no higher learning and did not have the adequate knowledge to translate Greek or Hebrew. Russell tried to stop the circulation of these documents and failed.

Russell not only lost the suit in court, but also was found to have committed perjury when he lied under oath about his knowledge of the Greek language. In the end Russell admitted that he had no knowledge of biblical languages, and Ross won the case. This is part of the trial transcript:

Question: (Ross’s Attorney Staunton) “Do you know the Greek Alphabet?”

Answer: (Russell) “Oh yes.”

Question: (Staunton) “Can you tell me the correct letters if you see them?”

Answer: (Russell) “Some of them, I might make a mistake on some of them.”

Question: (Staunton) “Would you tell me the names of those on top of the page, page 447 I have got here?”

Answer: (Russell) “Well, I don’t know that I would be able to.”

Question: (Staunton) “You can’t tell what those letters are, look at them and see if you know?”

Answer: (Russell) “My way…” [he was interrupted at this point and not allowed to explain]

Question: (Staunton) “Are you familiar with the Greek language?”

Answer: (Russell) “No.”

In 1908 Maria Russell (Charles T Russell’s wife) was granted a divorce from her husband. Divorces were much harder to obtain at that time. But Maria testified, with the support of others, that her husband had been seen kissing and fondling Rose, an orphan girl who shared their house. Rose was thirteen and fourteen at the time. Amongst other things the court was told that that he called Rose his little wife and jelly-fish, and told her that a man’s heart was so big he could love a dozen women, but a woman’s heart was so small she could only love properly one man.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not in any position to point the finger at other groups in relation to child sexual abuse. There is a website – silentlambs.org , run by and for people who have been sexually abused within the Jehovah’s Witness community, and particularly for those who have been discouraged or mistreated when they reported this abuse. The claim that there is no dishonesty or abuse in Jehovah’s Witness congregations is simply false.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are very badly misled. Their beliefs are a mixture of ridiculous inventions and ancient heresies long ago rejected by the Church as contrary to the Scriptures and to the teaching of the apostles.

When they arrive at your door, see this as an opportunity to share the life-giving truth about God’s love for them in Jesus. You may not wish to engage them in debate, but you could agree to accept some of their literature, if they agree to take and read some of yours (perhaps a copy of this paper). Finally, remember to pray for them, knowing that Jesus loves them and gave his life for them, just as he did for us.

Yeah but, this is just a co-incidence…

Well, it was a good investment for Kazakhstan, China, and Ukraine, anyway.