Unfortunately the welfare services also conflate "chavs" and "seriously disadvantaged" people. It would be discrimination to distinguish between the deserving poor and the undeserving, and the State cannot be seen to discriminate.

This is what the "Mail readers" don't like. They're not anti-welfare per se, they just want the welfare system to discriminate against people who make poor choices, and most particularly those who make poor choices with the intention of getting more benefits. They want the welfare system to encourage good choices, like saving money, getting a job, getting married, etc., instead of encouraging bad ones, like having more children to get a council house (oh yes, it happens) or spending your benefits on heroin or Sky Plus (ditto).

Most likely, there are a few choices that even you feel should be discouraged by the State, so on some level you already agree with them.

Oh, it happens. And if you're in the academic business, then I'm very surprised you've not noticed it.

Politics is very important in the business of accepting and rejecting papers. It's micro-politics, i.e. office politics. It's very important to get things accepted, but in order to do so, you have to be aware of the relevant political issues within the committee that will accept or reject your work. It's hard to write a paper that doesn't step on any toes, so you have to be sure you pick the right toes to step on.

When I was part of this business I was aware of a few long-standing feuds between academics; their research students and coworkers all took sides and rejected work from the other side. It was bizarre. It would have been funny if it had not been so pathetic. Even now I cannot watch an old Newman and Baddiel sketch without being reminded of childish feuding professors from real life.

I don't think every sort of science is like this. Probably in physics and chemistry, you can get unpopular work published just by being overwhelmingly right. But in softer non-falsifiable sciences, it's mostly about politics, and saying the right things. There are a whole bunch of suspect sciences that I could list, but I know that some of them would earn me an instant troll mod (ah, politics again!), so I'll leave it at that.

Brilliant! Yo MC Thatcher, pick it up:

"They would rather the poor were poorer,
Provided the rich were less rich."

If Ayn Rand books were the ones being censored, then Slashdot would have nothing to say.

If our society really did get back to book-burning, then Rand would be an early choice. I think this martyrdom is rather undeserved in her case, since there are far more dangerous authors, but being aware of the Streisand effect, we must expect any book that is widely burned to also be widely read. So, it is clearly better to burn the books that are simply believed to be dangerous, rather than the books that actually are, which should be disposed of quietly.

As to governments versus corporations, have some sense of proportion. You are trying to create a moral equivalency between despotic governments and major corporations, which suggests you have no sense of the scale at which these very different organisations operate.

I'm a lot more widely read than the Mail - which I do not actually even read! But I must admit that I have reluctantly given up on the present-day conventional wisdom regarding crime, so maybe that makes me equivalent to a Daily Mail reader.

The establishment, the broadcasters, the government, the judiciary, the upper ranks of the police force, the Guardian columnists: they've all got it dead wrong, and demonstrably so, but they insist on continuing to push bad policies because politics makes it impossible to do otherwise. Who dares break rank and point out the emperor's nakedness, thus effectively siding with the Daily Mail? It would be professional death.

I don't expect to convince you to switch sides, even though you are surely not under the same pressure to conform, but let me bring up two little things to challenge you.

Firstly, is the "us and them" mentality really unhelpful? I say not. In fact, it is a principle of civilisation - which can only exist by making a distinction against the uncivilised. "Us and them" is essential. We are civilised, they are not. We respect other people and their property, they do not. We don't break laws, they do.

Perhaps you know of the expression, "the thin blue line", which refers to the police force? The line is the division between "us and them" - the purpose of the police is to enforce it by defending "us" against "them". If there is no such line, because we are "them" and they are "us", then what is the purpose of the police? And indeed, the law, if the lawbreaker and the law-abiding are one and the same?

Secondly, you say that "Punishment...does little to reduce crime levels. In fact all it appears to do is increase them." A common enough meme these days - Ken Clarke MP shares it with you - but it doesn't explain the low crime rates in places with both robust law enforcement and an effective penal system. Examples might include present-day Singapore and 19th century Britain.

You have already countered that America has tough law enforcement and plenty of crime - but America's law enforcement is geographically incomplete, as evidenced by the prevalence of gangsters and systematic violence in some areas. If law enforcement is really so tough, how come any places are run by criminals? I'd also question whether America's penal system is really any good, given that federal prisoners now expect to be gang raped in prison. Clearly, an effective penal regime would not permit any gangs (or rapes) in prison.

Indeed, what are we disagreeing about? Not that enforcing laws is a good idea; nor that law enforcement is necessary for a stable society, nor even that social pressure can discourage crime.

But I think that you are shy about making judgments and jumping to conclusions. You worry about blaming crime on criminals - what if the "criminals" are not criminals at all, but merely ordinary people like yourself, forced into wrongdoing by bad laws and an unjust society?

What I am saying is, you don't need to worry about this. The burglar and the mugger are just as responsible for their actions as the tax evader. They are no less human; they are no less able to make the choice between right and wrong. Hence you can judge them. They are just as deserving of harsh punishment as the tax cheat. In fact, said punishment is probably the only thing that will stop them stealing, because they are not in fact motivated by bad laws and social injustice, but by plain laziness and a desire for reward without effort. Just like the tax cheat.

I agree the solution is obvious and simple, but wrong? I'm not convinced. I think my solution (robust law enforcement) works well as demonstrated by historical and contemporary evidence. Whereas alternative solutions only work well on paper and are disastrous in practice.

In any case, thankyou for taking the time to read my responses and reply to them.

I think you're changing the subject somewhat. However, two points.

Firstly, the people who take up such schemes are self-selecting. They are already the people who don't want to go back to prison! This is good, and of course they should have every encouragement, but there is no reason to think that the idea would be useful if applied to every criminal. On the whole, criminals commit crime because they like doing it and see no significant downside. Offering education and training is pointless without also punishing wrongdoing.

Secondly - and this is the issue I'm really talking about - these non-punishments are already used in place of real prison sentences because (1) they are cheaper, and (2) they are mistakenly believed to be better. You mention the Daily Mail so you will surely already be aware of the standard rants along these lines: convicted drug dealers sentenced to work in a charity shop, or ordered to do some lame "community service" like litter-picking or graffiti removal. The Daily Mail is full of shit, but this is one of the things it is right about - these punishments are crap! The lesson they teach is "do what you want, and there will be no consequences," which is exactly what you don't want muggers, car thieves and wife-beaters to be learning. Bluntly, you want them to learn to behave, and that requires a punishment that actually punishes.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

Are you sure? But you say crime is caused by:

some sort of societal breakdown wherein either violence is becoming an accepted and condoned solution to inappropriate problems, and/or people are becoming desperate enough to use violence where they otherwise wouldn't

Am I to understand that you believe if society were improved, such that there was (1) no desperation and (2) violence was not condoned, then crime would be isolated and rare? If so, then I think my statement, "You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken", is actually quite an accurate summary. "Widespread compliance" will be achieved naturally, you say, if only society is sufficiently stable and prosperous.

No matter, though. What you say has exposed the deeper point of disagreement. I believe that society cannot be stable or prosperous unless it is willing to enforce laws. Even against large numbers of people, if necessary.

We can surely come up with examples of crimes that would occur in a stable, prosperous society even if there were no threat of punishment. Tax evasion, for example. I bet you would agree that tax evasion is a serious crime, especially when large sums of money are involved.. and yet it is also a crime that would be very common if no action were taken against tax evaders. What's the incentive to do your taxes properly, if you know that 90% of the population are cheating and getting away with it?

I say that this principle applies to all crime. Social pressure alone is not enough to discourage crime; punishment is required as well. If the threat of prison will discourage city bankers from cheating on their taxes, then the threat of prison will also discourage house burglars and muggers.

Indeed, this is the sort of thing you will find in right-wing tabloids, but that doesn't make it axiomatically wrong. And yes, it is simple, but simplicity is good - remember the KISS principle. To me, the 20th century crime figures coupled with the notable absence of crime in places where criminals are not tolerated (e.g. Singapore) are hard evidence: robust law enforcement is all that is necessary for a stable and prosperous society. It takes a specially trained person - a criminologist, for example - to deny that the simplest solution is also the correct one.

I suppose you're right. I get frustrated at how one-sided the "debates" can be on this site, and I guess I end up stating the obvious in an attempt to address that.

As to how to do it better: well, it's very difficult to reform anything at this level. The entrenched interests - both in the government and in corporations - will resist any change that leaves them worse off. And yet a real improvement may actually require them to be worse off. Consider how badly insurance companies and their regulators would have lost out if Obama's healthcare plan had gone through in its early form. They fought hard to prevent that, and hence the healthcare reform was barely a reform at all.

So, my solution is to go outside of politics, even the office politics of government bureaucracy. Either allow reform to happen naturally through deregulation and market forces, or introduce a new regulator as an absolute replacement for the existing one with the (dictatorial) power to rebuild the whole regulatory system from scratch. Either way you don't have the issue of regulations built on top of regulations, with each "reform" just making things better for the entrenched.

Well, this is a point which we are certain to disagree on, because you have the causal relationship the wrong way around. You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken.

You should be forgiven for thinking this, because it's a very common viewpoint, shared by our ruling class and our mainstream media, with the notable exceptions of a few tabloid newspapers that decent people simply do not read. Nevertheless, it is demonstrably incorrect.

For example, I am sure that you would agree that 19th century British society was about as broken as any society could be, what with all the poverty, inequality and social injustice. And yet there was virtually no crime in relation to the present day, as you can see from the statistics (page 14). So how could this be explained, if not by robust law enforcement?

Your ideas have been tried in Britain... down to the letter. Incentives and opportunities - done it. "Prison makes bad people worse" - done it.

They don't work.

Even now, our "conservative" Home Secretary is parroting the same old lines about "community punishments" that we've been hearing for decades. He says exactly what you say - which is exactly what all of his recent predecessors have said. As if just a bit more leniency, understanding, incentive, opportunity will suddenly make all the difference. If it isn't working, do it some more.

If you want to look to History to justify your anti-prison beliefs, then you must look at the 19th century, where the crime rate was extremely in comparison to the present. One difference between their society and ours was their use of austere prisons - prisons run by the jailers rather than the inmates, with tough discipline. These were prisons that people didn't want to return to. Those are the sort of prisons you want.

Otherwise, what? Well, you're right! You're left with two options - hang them all, or do nothing. Neither is any good. Hence the third option: proper prisons, and a legal system and police force willing to use them.

Just a scapegoat. The same trend (very low crime in 1900, crazy crime rate by 2000) has occurred outside EU influence, for example in New Zealand and some parts of America. I'm not saying that the ECHR isn't part of the problem, but it is certainly not the cause.

You'd have to actually read through those blogs in order to find out how the British police fiddle the crime stats. There isn't a single link to the evidence you want - because if such a link were provided, anyone could look at it and declare it invalid and incomplete. It would, after all, be an anecdote about life in the police with an assurance that "it's always like this" and a few dozen comments saying "yes, it's like that at our nick, too".

It would take dozens (perhaps hundreds) of links to make the case clear, indicating a systemic problem rather than an isolated issue. At which point, we might as well have created a blog, so we're back at the start, and you'd still be saying "there is no relevant information".

Incidentally, six crimes a day (solved or not) is nothing compared to the amount of crime in London. It is totally pathetic. And the reason for this - along with the reliance on CCTV - is right there in those police blogs. Far from being irrelevant, they are at the heart of the matter.

Here is another one - this time by a detective. Along with the others, linked above, these offer an unparalleled education. Incidentally, PC Copperfield (one of the bloggers) appeared on a BBC programme - Panorama, I think - discussing his blog and the problems with the police. So, even the BBC approves.

Ever flip on a light switch? I do it all the time and it works pretty good. There's a highly regulated monopoly that works okay. How did regulation of old school utilities turn out okay despite the involvement of government?

Of course it works! You expect me to argue about that?? The argument is not, and has never been, that regulation prevents everything from working. (Although this has happened in particularly severe cases outside of the USA.)

No, what I am saying is that it could be even better. There was a discussion yesterday in which a large proportion of the posts were complaining about mis-regulation of energy companies, and how it benefits the incumbent oil, coal and gas industries with subsidies. This is exactly what I am talking about: the regulation benefits the incumbent.

You also seem to think that the telco sector is completely unregulated. I don't know where you got this from. There are plenty of laws preventing you setting up a competing ISP that won't block your Netflix. The established telcos are enjoying the benefits of their situation: the regulation benefits the incumbent.

What you say is "we need more laws". But people have said that before. Laws have been brought in by well-meaning people to redress problems like the ones you say, and each time, the result has been the same: the regulation benefits the incumbent.

On Slashdot it's mostly imagined that regulation is a wholly good thing, at least in principle: the government siding with the people against the corporations.

Any reminder of the problems that can be caused by regulation is therefore worthwhile.

This is not to say that regulation is a wholly bad thing, either. But it can easily make things worse, by closing out competition, for example.

Wherever you see corporations colluding against the public, you may be tempted to suggest regulation as the solution. If so, don't be surprised to discover that their industry is already heavily regulated, and (perversely) regulation is exactly what is enabling the collusion.

And what is the inevitable solution to that collusion? Why, more regulation, of course. The existing regulation must be inadequate, so we need more of it.

In other words, we have only a hammer, so every problem must be a nail. There is a cycle here, and it's not the virtuous sort.

So, if you wish to call for regulation, you should consider the regulation that's already in place. Why is it inadequate? And how is your proposal immunised against the same problems? Because you will not be the first person to suggest regulation - those who came before you had similar ideals, and despite their good intentions, they created the current mess.