When we learn that serious repeat offenders are loose yet again and have re-offended yet again, we can conclude nothing other than the fact that the guardians of our society do not really know what they are doing. We suspect that they think they know what they are doing, but are mistakenly conducting foolhardy experiments using innocent members of society as guinea pigs.

We witness for ourselves too much destruction caused by their failures to have any real confidence in their ability to judge successfully who is safe for release and who is not.

When someone's property or physical person gets smashed up, or they suffer the psychological mutilation of armed robbery or knife attack by a repeat offender, we don't perceive even a faint "oops!" in response, let alone detect an apology ever taking place. The decision-makers responsible just don't seem to want to know about the impact of backfires on the public beyond issuing statements to the effect that it really isn't their fault. Moreover, they appear to shift the blame onto the public. Some have gone to the extent of claiming that the public generally doesn't have much respect for law and order nowadays anyway and therefore it deserves what it gets. That is a totally outlandish claim.

With all due respect to the learned lords of the bench, their legal-eagle friends and the oily-tongued legislators, it is certain that judges, barristers and senior public servants can afford better home and car security systems than can the remainder of the public. They also live in generally lower crime-rate suburbs. They are less likely to be victims.

Most people are aware that rehabilitation of offenders does have some merit, but most have also at some stage suffered some sort of negative impact from highly destructive individuals. For many, that impact has been severe. It is made all the more distressing by the fact that the offenders usually have existing and often extensive criminal histories.

Clearly, offenders are being released when they are not rehabilitated, and little is being done to rehabilitate them. An astute person gathers that in spite of all the palaver, no-one knows precisely how to rehabilitate them anyway, or else it would surely happen. "Chuck them out and hope for a miracle" is what the approach appears to be. Certainly, many of these characters will eventually grow out of offending, but at what cost to the community in the meantime?

We also can't help noticing that there are a lot of professionals, including judges, whose lucrative livelihoods revolve around advancing this particular spin. Those people would clearly have a vested interest in blinking the fact that they don't actually know how to achieve the suggested outcome. They get well paid from the public purse for continuing to try.

This may seem a harsh judgment on respected and well-meaning people, but from the public's viewpoint it's not unrealistic to suspect that like the snake-oil salesmen of the past, they believe their claims because it's in their best interest to believe them, and there is just sufficient 'proof' that their remedy works to some degree in some instances to suggest that it ought to work well in almost all instances.

The truth about rehabilitation from the lay-person's point of view is that it works with some offenders some of the time, but it is clearly being attempted with nearly all offenders nearly all of the time. That necessarily produces a failure rate, seriously exposing the public's property, life and limb to threatened and actual losses. Those losses further destroy the public's faith and trust in law and order. That results in an increasingly generalised disregard for it. For that, we are blasted with the outrageous claim of decision-makers that crime is a community problem and it has to be solved by the community within the community. That is a ridiculous generalisation.

To further cement the impression of rot in the public mind, the only possible conclusion we can come to is that one way or another, money and the political interest of sitting governments are among the main factors driving these failed experiments. Kicking offenders out of jail is cheaper and politically less dangerous than keeping them in. The overall cost of crime to the community would be an embarrassment if it was known, but no-one is compiling those statistics accurately. It would be impossible anyway, since a great many crimes are no-longer reported. The public have largely given up in disgust.

A friend of mine lives a few doors down from a family of 'ferrals' living in a housing commission home. 'Ferrals' isn't a nice description, but given the number of them living in the home, their presentation and their behaviour, the term is sadly apt. For months on end people in the neighborhood have had their car tyres slashed, letter-boxes smashed, huge rocks thrown through windows, there has been knife-wielding etc. People have been terrified and hugely angered. The police have nearly always been unable to act on these crimes for lack of witnesses. Many people wouldn't make reports for fear of retribution, which is understandable, especially when it's considered that those who did approach police got no joy, anyway.

A person in that home has now been arrested for some of these offences. It is clear that this person is well known to police and has an established criminal history. Of course, this person was quickly freed again on bail. It is clear that this person had been released into the community for 'rehabilitation', yet is is clear that this person is nothing like rehabilitated.

How can intelligent members of the community avoid asking the question "which idiots let him out?" My answer is "the same ones who are blaming the community for the level of crime."