Odds favour criminals

This month has seen the death of the notorious British child killer Myra Hindley, the “Moors murderer” who spent the remaining 36 years of her life behind bars.

Hindley’s death made headlines because her ghastly crime represented an abnormality in English society, a freakish reminder that evil can lurk anywhere.

It is ironic that at roughly the same time as Britain reflected on the periodic incidence of child murders, the secular press in South Africa carried reports of child rapes, the brutality and frequency of which might have sickened even Hindley and her ilk.

Had Hindley committed her perverse crimes in South Africa today, she likely would have died a free woman.

At the core of South Africa’s crime problem is not the absence of the death penalty, as proponents of that form of justice claim, but the absence of any meaningful threat of punishment in the first place.

This is a problem that concerns all arms of law enforcement (and the law itself).

It is not an overreaction to say that in South Africa the law regularly fails the victims of crime, especially when these are women and children, and the crime involves rape.

The path to justice is littered with obstacles. The likelihood of a criminal being caught is generally remote. And if a criminal is apprehended, a trial might not proceed. And if a trial does proceed, and if the criminal is convicted, the sentence often fails to reflect the severity of the crime (especially in cases of rape). And if criminals do land up in jail, as many admittedly do, most serve only a small portion of their sentence before being paroled or pardoned.

Unofficial figures, obtained in 1999 from a retired magistrate in Gauteng, back this up. There is little reason to believe that much has changed in the intervening three years. Accordingly, serious offenders faced a 22% chance of being arrested. Of these, only 50% were going to be tried in court. Of these, less than half faced the chance of being convicted and serving serious jail time.

Most gamblers would regard these figures as excellent odds.

Criminals will not be deterred from engaging in unlawful activity unless these odds are materially shortened

This requires increased state spending, especially in the under-resourced departments of safety and security, justice and correctional services (of course, other sources of crime, such as poverty and unemployment, must be addressed as well).

At the same time, corrupt and inept officials in these departments–from the highest level down–must be identified and dismissed. There can be no place in a war on crime for judges who find mitigating circumstances in the “gentle rape” of a child, for policemen who can see no offence in the shocking injuries of a toddler who has been raped to death, or for prison warders who facilitate the escape from custody of hardened killers.

Without a doubt, the government shares the population’s anxiety about crime. It has, however, failed to translate sentiment into perceptible action.

The government seems to lack the political will to send a message to the perpetrators of crime–you shall be found, arrested, tried and punished–and back this up with action.