More of Peter Hitchens on Punishment

from Marriage a la Mode:

'Prison works' is the idea that prison at least removes bad people from the streets while they are doing time. This is blindingly obvious, but also rather useless. The moment they are released, they start being bad again. A lot of people do wicked things and are never caught. So, unless you can lock all bad people up, all the time, you are achieving nothing of lasting value. Either you have to admit that you can only deal with a tiny proportion of crime, or you will have to carpet the remaining green spaces of Britain with enormous, expensive prison camps to house tens of thousands of unrepentant, unashamed, unafraid thieves and brutes until they are too old and weak to be a threat.

The idea appeals to fake right-wingers because it sounds good in a two-minute TV debate on 'law and order', in which the liberal case, involving pious hopes of 'rehabilitation' which are never fulfilled, is even more lame. It also appeals to them because they haven't thought about it for more than a few seconds. Also because they shy at the mention of hard old copybook words such as 'punishment' and ‘retribution’.

These things, properly used, do actually alter people's behaviour (whereas there is no evidence of 'rehabilitation' ever happening, so far as I know). But 'modern' right-wingers imagine themselves to be so civilised that they think it is wrong to use fear or shame to get people to behave better. They forget - as we all tend to do - that our gentle civilisation was bought by centuries of hard and often brutal conflict, in which the good side generally won.

Well, I think fear and shame are powerful weapons in the hands of a just ruler, and that since we abandoned them, we have gone seriously wrong. And this also affects the argument about marriage. I think we should not be embarrassed about being hard-faced on some issues which concern our survival as a nation and a people. I'm lucky enough to have travelled in the regions of the world where they produce more history than they can consume locally, and to know that the soft green safety of the British Isles is utterly untypical of the fate of the human race in general.

We may think of civil war, invasion, subjugation, mass exile and enslavement as things which happened in the Bible, or far away, or are buried in the remote history of these islands (a view you could only take if you knew little about Ireland, by the way).

But cross a short stretch of water to the East and you will find people with living memories of barbarities that would have made Tamerlane and Genghis blush. We all know (or think we know - the reality is often too horrible for us to bear, so we stop listening after a while) about the massacre of Europe's Jews and the mass-slavery and serfdom imposed by the Nazis on the peoples they conquered. . But far too few know of the Russian civil wars and purges, the mass deportations of the Baltic peoples to Siberia. These are the things that happened to societies which either broke down through internal disease, or failed to defend themselves against easily predictable threats. These were modern countries, with middle class people living in nice houses and going to comfy offices in motor cars one day, and crammed into cattle cars the next, with death waiting at the end of the line.

And that is just Europe. Go a little further and it becomes even worse.