It's heartbreaking to walk through the beautiful Eden Hills Recreation Park and adjoining National Trust registered Watiparinga Reserve to view ugly graffiti sprayed on rocks and trees. The additional sight of empty spray-cans willfully tossed into the creek that traverses this spectacular gorge further reinforces the thought that the vandals responsible respect nothing. They couldn't care less about the damage they cause in their selfish pursuit of gratification.

Graffiti damage has been taken fairly lightly by South Australian authorities. To the best of public knowledge the worst punishment offenders receive is a slap on the wrist and a telling off. Courts have been unwilling to retaliate harshly against those detected, presumably for reasons which align with their current thinking. They believe that making criminals out of minor offenders is itself willful damage.

While such reasons appear sensible and humanistic several points get lost along the way.

One is that lack of a firm stance against graffiti results in the overwhelming majority of it going unreported. If every instance of graffiti vandalism was counted, property damage crime figures would have blasted through the ionosphere compared to previous eras. That could be an embarrassment to governments.

Justice officials may point out that paint spray-cans didn't exist in bygone times. Their critics would argue that neither did youth protected against meaningful discipline by tough laws leveled at parents and guardians.

A further point is that an excessive focus on rehabilitation of offenders is necessarily at loggerheads with the issuing of deterrent penalties. To the layperson, that can only mean that as rapidly as one offender is (supposedly) rehabilitated another will appear. That in turn means that nothing is gained in terms of crime reduction. The quoting of statistics to prove otherwise is unconvincing when the public are well aware that reporting of offences is declining due to perceived apathy on the part of justice officials.

Yet another point, mystifying in its gravity, is the violent clash between widespread graffiti and the criminologists own avidly supported principle of crime prevention.

The ready availability of paint spray cans and coloured markers, along with the infinite availability of target surfaces, renders crime prevention ideas useless against graffiti. Since crime prevention is an integral part of the soft-option approach to crime control, and since by criminologists own claims offenders progress from minor crimes to more serious ones, the interested observer is led to ask how it could possibly be that these experts haven't snookered themselves.

Perhaps criminologists can see things that others can't. But they cannot blame us for suggesting that when crime control becomes academic instead of practical the results forthcoming are likely to be far more academic than practical.