First-Time and Repeat Offenders

Theodore Dalrymple eloquently makes a crucial distinction between first-time and repeat offenders, a distinction that the crime-fighters in our current government should take careful note of:

Here it is worth drawing a distinction between the primary prevention of crime (preventing people from becoming criminals in the first place) and the secondary prevention of crime (preventing criminals from re-offending)…

With regard to secondary prevention, we are often told that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the western world, and so it has, but imprisonment is used frivolously, if I may so put it. One sentence of four years has a very different effect from 16 sentences of three months, although the total amount of time spent in prison might be the same. One often finds in the most horrible cases in New Zealand that the culprit has been convicted scores, or even hundreds, of times…If a man has already been convicted 99 times, the problem is not obtaining a conviction the hundredth time, but taking his crime seriously once he has been convicted.