Illegal downloading

People in the UK who go online and illegally download music and films may have their internet access cut under plans the government is considering. A draft consultation Green Paper suggests internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material.

The BBC is reporting that the Government at last appears to be heading into doing something about people who illegally download material off the internet.

It is a long way from fruition, however I hope that this legislation is passed. Illegal downloading is nothing short of theft - which is illegal under both British law and God's law - and more needs to be done to stop such behaviour.

I do wonder, though, if this will be an effective deterrent. Perhaps rather cynically, I doubt it.

Youth Restorative Justice

We complained yesterday about the Government's Orwellian "One-Stop" plan to site the police, social care, advice and welfare services on school grounds. However, not everything in the Children's Plan was so ill-conceived. For, early next year a new scheme is to be piloted to deal with first-time offenders aged between 10 and 17 who have committed a minor offence. Under the scheme, such first time young offenders instead of being sent to court will have to explain their actions and apologise to their victim, either orally or in writing:

We intend therefore to pilot a restorative approach to youth offenders from April 2008. The Youth Restorative Disposal aims to prevent re-offending through a more rehabilitative approach and the involvement of victims so offenders have to face up to the consequences of even low level offending, and the pilots will look at whether this is a more appropriate way to deal with particularly low level, first offences.

Hopefully this will both help address behaviour to prevent reoffending at an early stage and allow police to deal with minor cases more speedily and efficiently, freeing them to deal with more serious crime. Whether the scheme proves at all successful may well depend on the kind of support provided to the first time young offenders after they apologise. Otherwise, the influences that led them to commit their first offence will presumably continue to lead them astray.

On Punishment & Rehabilitation

Coinciding with the death after 55 years in jail of John Straffen, Britain's longest serving prisoner, at the age of 77, there was an interesting piece on the Today programme this morning about a cleaning firm in Birmingham that is training prisoners to help them find work on release. I've tried to find a few more details online, but can only locate a report from March 2005 describing a similar scheme in south Wales. With the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, last week criticising the government's sentencing policy for contributing to the problem of prison overcrowding, and knowing that 64% of those released from custody and 61% of those placed on probation are convicted of another crime within two years, perhaps now would be a good time to reconsider alternative options, such as tough community sentences†, that not only protect the public but also improve the reparation and rehabilitation of offenders.

† Not to mention more appropriate treatment for drug abusers and the mentally ill.
See also: Justice: Retributive or Restorative? and Prisons Need Inner Change

Stupidity in Practice

"One day we will all wake up to the namby-pamby, politically-correct approach that for economic reasons seems to be adopted to save the police paperwork - instead of letting them get on with their jobs."

Jailing a serial thief who stole a pensioner's purse, but was given just an £80 on-the-spot fine after committing an identical offence two years earlier despite a string of more than 30 previous thefts, Judge Timothy Nash has condemned the Government's policy of on-the-spot fines:

"The issue of a penalty notice ticket for the criminal offence of shoplifting as a device is stupidity in practice. It means, not infrequently, that people don't have their difficulties addressed by a court, which is better able to deal with shoplifters than anybody issuing what is in effect a parking ticket."

The judge thus maintains that, in sparing almost 200,000 offenders every year the humiliation of a court appearance, Labour's policy is unfair to the community and leads to offenders not getting help from the courts. But then, as we have discussed before, this Government appears to think criminal justice is solely about punishment and seems completely closed to the possibility of transformative justice. In Labour's Big Brother world, transgressors are to be punitively controlled, not reformed, let alone helped back to the point where they can make a positive contribution to society.

Self-Defence Poll Results

Here are the fairly unequivocal results of our last poll, which asked about your views on the use of "proportionate, reasonable force" permitted by the Criminal Law Act 1967:

Do we need an urgent review of the law protecting those who intervene in criminal situations?

Yes.  91% (29 votes)

No.  9% (3 votes)

Not sure.  0% (0 votes)

Total voters for this poll: 32

Our new poll asks whether the ABC classification system for drugs should be replaced with an "index of harms."

Alternative to Misuse of Drugs

Yesterday's controversial proposals to legalise all drugs, made in the thirty page report "Drugs Policy: A Radical Look Ahead?" by the chief constable of North Wales, Richard Brunstrom, have today received further support from a former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham: "I used to reckon that 80 per cent of those people received into prison were misusing a substance of some kind when they came in. The amount of acquisitive crime connected to drug abuse is immense. That is why there needs to be a new approach."

Of course, they are not alone in claiming that drugs policy has been based on "moralistic political rhetoric" rather than evidence. Earlier this year the independent UK Drug Policy Commission reported that both government education schemes and treatment of addicts have had little impact, while the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) suggested that UK drug law had been "driven by moral panic" and was "not fit for purpose." Indeed, the chief constable even quotes John Reid as acknowledging that "prohibition doesn't work" and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, as conceding "it drives the activity underground."

Nevertheless, the Government and the likes of Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, have predictably dismissed the proposals. Yet, in calling for the repeal of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, Mr Brunstrom is not calling for an "anarchic free-for-all," as some reports seem to suggest. Instead, he proposes replacing the current ABC classification for drugs with a new, scientifically-based "Hierarchy of Harm" including tobacco and alcohol, and decoupled from criminal penalties:

"Drugs and psychotropic substances are simply not going to go away as if by magic. And so, if drugs cannot be eradicated (and the evidence that they cannot is now overwhelming), then the principal object of public policy should be to reduce as far as possible the great harms that they can and do cause."

This is precisely the same as the index of harms classification system for drugs proposed by the Commons Science Select Committee last year and supported by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy when it recommended replacing the Misuse of Drugs Act with a broader Misuse of Substances Act earlier this year. When we read statistics such as that the cost of alcohol and tobacco to the NHS in England is double that of all illegal drugs and that in Scotland in 2004, tobacco killed about 13,000 people and alcohol 2,052, while just 356 died from all other illegal drugs put together, Brunstrom is surely right to dismiss the ABC system as "indefensible, both legally and ethically" and "arbitrary, and subject to politically-motivated manipulation" and to call for a national debate on the issue, isn't he?

Reasonable Self-Defence

Justice Secretary Jack Straw says the Government is to hold an urgent review of the law protecting those who intervene in criminal situations in England and Wales.

The Norfolk farmer Tony Martin perhaps most famously has been held up as an everyman's hero after he shot two intruders who had broken into his farmhouse in 1999, resulting the death of 16-year-old Fred Barras. However, as has been argued by others, his case was somewhat different from Jack Straw's "millisecond judgements" to intervene on four occasions after witnessing a robbery or burglary. For, while many of us might worry about being burgled and might install alarms and security lighting to deter intruders, few of us would acquire an unlicensed lethal weapon and wait in the dark for trespassers to strike, having first warned the police of our intentions, as Martin did after twice being broken into.

What do you think? Is the use of "proportionate, reasonable force" already permitted by the Criminal Law Act 1967 to apprehend suspects sufficient, or do we really need an urgent review? Or is this perhaps just a bit of "tough on crime" posturing before a likely election? Take the poll in the sidebar or leave a comment.

DNA Database Debate

At the start of the month, Lord Justice Sedley described the national DNA database as indefensible, unfair and inconsistent and called for the DNA of every citizen to be included. Then last week the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report suggesting that police should only be allowed to store permanently bioinformation from people who are convicted of a crime and that the potential benefits of establishing a population-wide forensic DNA database would not be great enough to justify the cost and intrusion to privacy at the current time. So who's right?

A poll was conducted for tonight's Panorama, Give Us Your DNA, indicating that 66% of the population would be in favour of everyone's DNA being sampled when they reached the age of 18, but that 64% would oppose samples being taken at birth. Thus, the programme suggested, the main objection against a universal DNA database is simply its being impolitic, rather than in any way inefficient. However, a senior forensic scientist who is the Director of Forensic Institute, Professor Allan Jamieson, believes that people put too much faith in DNA and are giving it an infallibility which it does not have. As he explained to the interviewer, "We've shaken hands. My DNA will be on your hand. You may touch something outside of this room that I have never touched, and therefore my DNA will be somewhere where I have never been."

As a geneticist, I would have few reservations about equipping the police with a tool that has proven invaluable in helping them to solve crimes, so long as adequate safeguards were in place to protect against the possibility of mistaken identity — such as not allowing cases to proceed where DNA alone is the only evidence. After all, even fingerprints, which cannot be carried off by anyone else, are not infalliable determiners of identity, as the case of PC Shirley McKie proved ten years ago.

In the current climate of CCTV, biometric passports and identity cards, however, and with our country already increasing resembling a police state or surveillance society, I cannot see how any expansion of the existing database could be achieved without damaging the relationship between citizens and the police, between people and government. No longer innocent until proven guilty, citizens treated with dignity and respect, we increasingly risk being reduced to potential suspects to be monitored and controlled by every means at every junction. Yet, healthy relationships are surely key to the social well-being of society, just as they are to the social well-being of individuals. Therefore, unless we want to lose what remains of our community structures, we must resist any moves towards a national DNA database.

Wasting Police Time

Want to know what's wrong with policing in this country and why crime and antisocial behaviour seem out of control? Then make sure you watch Panorama on BBC1 tonight as Stuart Davidson, the police constable responsible for The Policeman's Blog goes public:

"Everyone joins the police with the aim of catching burglars, catching thieves, solving crimes. But as a uniformed officer available for deployment I would spend over half of my time writing in the office. Eighty per cent of what I did was a waste of time. There comes a point where you think, 'This isn't really why I joined.'"

By the sounds of it, the programme will live up to the blogger's strapline, "This blog will do more to put people off calling the police than anything, other than actually calling the police."

Two-Thirds Want Child Offenders Charged

Here are the results of our last poll. A significant majority of you clearly feel that the age of criminal responsibility should be lowered by at least a year or two:

Should the age of criminal responsibility be changed?

Yes, raise it to 17 or 18  2% (1 votes)

Yes, raise it to 15 or 16  0% (0 votes)

Yes, raise it to 13 or 14  5% (3 votes)

Yes, raise it to 11 or 12  3% (2 votes)

No, keep it at 10  27% (17 votes)

Yes, lower it to 8 or 9  43% (27 votes)

Yes, lower it to 7 or younger  21% (13 votes)

Total voters for this poll: 63

Make sure you take our new poll on military interventionism abroad.

Tackling Child Offenders

Last year, the suspect in 2,840 crimes was under ten years old, including around 1,300 cases of arson or criminal damage and 66 sexual offences. However, as the law currently stands, a child aged nine or under cannot be charged with an offence.

Lawrence Lee, the solicitor for one of the ten-year-old killers of two-year-old James Bulger says that lowering the age of criminal responsibility would send an important message to child offenders: "If you go along to any estate and see the age of kids marauding around like a pack of wolves, you'd see that reducing the age of criminal responsibility to eight or nine would be vital."

Earlier this year, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies suggested moving responsibility for youth justice from the Home Office to the Department for Education and Skills and proposed raising the age of criminal responsibility to as high as eighteen, while a representative of the Children's Society suggests fourteen years should be the minimum, noting "If you look at how children are treated by government and legislation you have to be 18 to be able to vote, 16 to have sex and yet 10 to be held accountable for committing a crime."

So, what do you think? Take the poll in the sidebar.

For comparison, the age of criminal responsibility varies significantly in other countries, ranging from as low as six in some US states and eight in Scotland, to twelve in Canada and the Netherlands, thirteen in France, fourteen in Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan, and Russia, fifteen in Scandinavia, and as high as sixteen in Spain and Portugal, and eighteen in Brazil and Peru.

Peace On The Streets

Truce is a scheme designed to help young people escape from east London gangs. Bringing together thousands of young people in Hackney and Waltham for a series of concerts, its success rate is impressive: 84% of those indicating they wanted to get out of gangs were out within three months and hadn’t returned to the gangs after a further three months. Those who wanted to get out of gangs also showed a reduction in repeat offending: street crime dropped by more than 30% compared with 2005.

Yet, despite these achievements, certain groups objected to the initiative and claimed that the organiser, Police deputy superintendent Leroy Logan, had put his faith before his role as a police officer because Truce involved 100 churches as well as 70 statutory and voluntary agencies. Such blind prejudice is reminiscent of objections made against the faith-based prisoner reform programme Inner Change, credited with reducing reoffending from 55% to just 8%. You would have thought people would be happy that methods had been found to bring crime and antisocial behaviour under control ... but not when it is Christians who are leading the way, it seems.

To find out more about how Truce is slowly defeating the sad acceptance that crime is just a way of life, and instead encouraging victims of crime to work with the police to solve their communities' problems, make sure you have ordered your copy of The Difference, due out this week.

It's Time To Fight Back

Last Friday, David Cameron said crime-fighting measures would fail "if we don't build the prisons and train the necessary staff to run them." Today, he published It's time to fight back, his party's plans for tackling the country's crime crisis.

In contrast to the Government's failed "one-dimensional approach" of hyperactive legislation, the document proposes a three-stage solution to fighting crime: in the short term, getting more police back on the street; in the medium, reforming schools and the criminal justice system; and in the long run, strengthening families and communities. It contains many excellent recommendations, including: facilitating a permanent police visibility on the streets, scrapping the Early Release Scheme, reforming alcohol licensing, providing local control over policing, introducing a UK Border Police, and abolishing the Human Rights Act.

Among the proposals, Cameron pledges "A Conservative Government will build more prison places." However, a poll published in today's Guardian indicates that the public no longer believes tough prison sentences are the best way to tackle crime:

Politicians in all parties routinely assume that voters think prison works. But 51% of those questioned want the government to find other ways to punish criminals and deter crime...

Opposition to more imprisonment is driven by a widespread belief that prisons make crime worse. More people agree with the statement "prison doesn't work, it turns people into professional criminals who then commit more crime" than think "prison punishes crime, keeps criminals off the streets and deters others".

Only 42% of all voters, and 39% of women, think prisons are an effective punishment, against 49%, and 52% of women, who say they fail to work.

Quite clearly, whoever is in power has much to do if public faith in the prison system is to be restored. It is therefore encouraging to see that the thinking behind the Conservatives' prison building proposals is not merely to "keep criminals off the streets" but that "reducing overcrowding is the key to reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners." Furthermore, in view of suggestions made by this blog for an altogether more creative approach towards justice, it is good to read that the Conservatives are committed to transforming prisons from Labour's overcrowded "human warehouses" into "places of education, hard work, rehabilitation and restoration."

The policy document continues: "A Conservative Government will reform prison regimes to help break the cycle of reoffending, and we will ensure appropriate provision for the mentally ill and offenders with drugs problems. Furthermore, we believe that far more needs to be done to assist and supervise ex-offenders on their release from prison. Here there is a central role for the voluntary sector." This too, as previously suggested by this blog, would surely also prove an invaluable step in restoring faith in the whole justice system. Moreover, given that 90% of prisoners have at least one significant mental health problem†, providing proper treatment for those who are mentally ill might also go some way to addressing the prison overcrowding problem!

As always, let us know in the comments what you think should be done.

† Source: recent Hansard reference to "Psychiatric morbidity among prisoners in England and Wales" (Office for National Statistics, 1998)

Defending the Socially Responsible

"We should ask not just what we expect from our government in response to these dreadful crimes - but what do we expect from ourselves and from society? Just as the Military Covenant sets out what we - society - must do for our military, so today we should consider our obligations in tackling crime and building a stronger society."

What hope have we really got of realising the Conservative's vision for a socially responsible society when a train guard who was attacked by a group of disorderly youths after he asked them to take their feet off a seat is fired from his job? Southeastern railway say he should have walked away, but as the sacked guard, Robbie Moran notes, "Walking away and abandoning your passengers to someone that's being aggressive, that's not customer care to me."

Even before questions about the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones by a BMX-riding teenager in Croxteth have ceased being asked, today we learn that a 23-year-old man with learning difficulties, Brent Martin, has died in hospital after being "savagely attacked" by a gang of up to five youths on Sunderland's Town End Farm estate — an area of low-level anti-social behaviour and relatively low level crime.

David Cameron is surely right when he suggests we need "a national recognition that it is not just up to the Government to take responsibility for the state of our nation, it is up to all of us":

To me this is what social responsibility is all about. Not just sitting back and saying that the government must act, but all of us saying: this is my country, my society, my responsibility - and I must play my part.

It means parents taking responsibility for bringing up children properly. It means schools playing their part in instilling discipline and good values. It means all of us recognising our obligations not just as parents but as neighbours, as members of a community and understanding that those obligations are as important as simply paying our taxes and obeying the law. It means understanding and acting on that age old maxim that it takes a village to raise a child. It means retailers stopping the sale of alcohol to young teenagers. It means music companies, media companies, games manufacturers, not just thinking "what is my social responsibility as a company in terms of the projects I support and the charities I back, good and important as they are" but asking: "what is the effect of the music I produce, the games I market and the programmes I broadcast?"

That is true social responsibility.

We should be a country that defends the actions of people like Mr Moran, not one that always seems to take the side of the bully, even to defend the "rights" of killers such as Learco Chindamo.

Is William Golding's Lord of the Flies even required reading in schools still?

First Impressions

Fresh back from a wonderful time in Venice and the best part of a week completely without listening to or reading any news, my first thoughts are "We're becoming as bad as America" — Police shot at in an M5 pursuit, just days after biker Gerry Tobin was murdered on the M40, and Liverpool's 11-year-old Rhys Jones the country's latest victim of gun crime.

Commenting on a past post about gun crime, Jeremy from Liverpool suggested using dog training to help reform disruptive teenagers. Has anybody else got any suggestions about how the worsening trend towards a gun culture might be reversed, besides the Government's usual more legislation?

UPDATE #1: I have now seen Iain Duncan Smith's excellent piece in the Daily Mail:

This social decline has come about because of the breakdown of the family, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, and the collapse of any political will to uphold the law.

Britain is now truly the sick man of Europe, with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, divorce, alcoholism among the young, drug misuse and educational failure.

He suggests introducing a policy of zero tolerance towards all anti-social behaviour, ensuring the courts act more efficiently in dealing with offenders, and that the police, who he says "are not only weighed down by bureaucracy but have been rendered almost powerless against offenders by the State's obsession with human rights" must reclaim the streets. Picking up on last month's Social Justice Policy Group report, he also discusses practical steps to tackling family breakdown, reforming the welfare state and dealing confidently with drug and alcohol abuse.

In case anyone had forgotten, this is but one very solid reason why we need a Conservative Government after the next general election.UPDATE #2: "Anarchy in the UK"

I see that Cameron has also been busy while I was away, calling for the Human Rights Act to be scrapped and replaced with a new Bill of Rights and for a strengthening of family and community bonds to help counter the rise of yob culture:

We need to make men realise that having children is an 18-year commitment - not a one-night stand. We need to make mothers realise that it's work, not welfare, that offers their family the best future. We need to help couples stay together, not drive them apart with the tax and benefits system. And we need to make society as a whole - that's you and me - realise that we all have duties to our neighbours.

Now I just need to check out Louise Bagshawe's Reasons to vote Conservative at ConservativeHome.

Airport Protests

Officers at the Camp for Climate Action outnumber the 600 protesters by two to one. [The Guardian]

Is this really how we want to use our overstretched police? If the anarchist elements within the climate change movement pose such a threat — and, according to Sky News, are planning to cause disruption inside Heathrow — why not just shut the camp down and redeploy our tax-funded police officers to patrol our streets and protect the likes of Dr Victoria Anyetei, stabbed on her doorstep in Dartford on Tuesday, and Tyrone Gilbert, the father-of-three shot at a wake in Manchester last Friday?

Criminals Unsupervised Under Labour

Thanks to ten years of Government obsession with targets and legislation, the Chief Inspector of Probation says that many offenders are not monitored or supervised properly because there are too many demands on probation staff in England and Wales. Writing in HM Inspectorate of Probation Annual Report, Andrew Bridges says:

"Over the past ten years the increasing demands have included new Orders or requirements for drug treatment and testing, for accredited programmes and for managing prolific offenders, extended periods of post-release supervision, increased public protection expectations, enhanced standards of quality for unpaid work and other supervision requirements. Case numbers have also increased by taking in less serious offenders, due in part to pressures to meet national quantitative targets and in part due to the general increasing severity of Court sentencing – a decade earlier many such offenders would have been fined."

Here in Kent, Maidstone Prison has today been condemned for its drugs culture, dirty and untidy facilities, and lack of training opportunities for inmates — problems compounded by the reopening of a wing deemed "unfit for purpose" in a belated attempt by the Government to deal with the national lack of prison places. Coming on the back of the recent announcement by the Home Office to release 25,500 prisoners early each year in order to ease prison overcrowding, is anybody else concerned that the Prisons and Probation Services will no longer be able to "punish, help, change and control" offenders? What ever happened to "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime"?

Hat-tip for graphic: Beau Bo D’Or

Music's Medicine

• Is some music, are some lyrics, are some videos and are some artists, helping to create a culture in which an anti-learning culture, truancy, knives, violence, guns, misogyny are glorified?
• Can we see the effects of this on our young people, in our schools and on our streets?
• Do we think we can combat this culture by government policies, policing and criminal justice alone?

Calling on the UK music industry to promote positive role models for young people to look up to, David Cameron answers: yes, yes, and no, respectively.

If people are now beginning to accept that certain music has indeed become a poison of young people's minds and a poison of our broken society, perhaps there is yet hope that it may once again become "the medicine of the mind" and "the medicine of the breaking heart."

Sowing Instability

"It is an accepted axiom of the modern age that distance no longer matters. Sectarian carnage can sway stock markets on the other side of the planet. Anarchic cities that host open-air arms bazaars imperil the security of the world’s superpower. A hermit leader’s erratic behavior not only makes life miserable for the impoverished millions he rules but also upends the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime. The threats of weak states, in other words, ripple far beyond their borders and endanger the development and security of nations that are their political and economic opposites."

In publishing the third annual Failed States Index, Foreign Policy magazine and The Fund for Peace assert that the world's weakest states aren't just a danger to themselves, but threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.

As if to prove the point, the latest World Drug Report confirms how events on the other side of our global village are devastating lives on our own doorsteps. We already knew that last year's bumper opium crop in Afghanistan meant the country had become the source of 92% of the world's supply of opium. We now learn that opium cultivation in the country involves one in eight (12.6%) of the population and that 50% of the heroin on Britain's streets comes from Helmand alone, the province supposedly under British control.

Afghanistan's record poppy yield and drug trafficking routes, fuelled by underground heroin factories, bring crime, addiction, and HIV/AIDS in their wake. The industry finances the activities of the Taleban, against whom the 7,700 troops we have deployed in the country are fighting. Britain's new ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, already believes we could be heavily involved in Afghanistan for decades to come. Once again, if we are to have any hope of bringing stability to the region, we must give serious consideration to the Conservatives' suggestion to license the Afghan opium poppy crop.

Prisons Need Inner Change

Earlier this week Lord Falconer announced that as many as 25,000 prisoners will be released early due to prison overcrowding in England and Wales, as though this will somehow help the Government to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime."

The fact is Labour has failed when it comes to crime: Our prison population is now the highest in Western Europe (having doubled since 1993, approximately 147 people out of every 100,000 are now in prison in England and Wales) and two thirds of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of being released. Just last month the Lord Chancellor told the Probation Board Association, "The challenge we face is that of how to turn the offender into the citizen ... by giving people a future to follow, they can leave their past behind," yet it seems every month we hear about another prisoner released on licence who has gone on to rape or murder.

What a pity then that politically correct concerns about diversity last year forced the closure of a voluntary pilot project called "Inner Change" in Dartmoor Prison. The programme, discussed briefly on the Today programme just after eight-thirty this morning, originated in the States and is accredited with reducing reoffending from 55% to just 8%.

The problem with the programme, for all its potential and promise of success, was it didn't satisfy this Government's liberal agenda. It was criticised by the Prison Service's Area Psychologist, who thought its belief that "the root of offending is in individual sin" "lacks basis in specific scientific research" and its promotion of the virtues of heterosexual marriage was "discriminatory."

In this Orwellian society in which we now find ourselves, I hadn't realised that NewLabour had introduced a form of NewSpeak, where "tough" means "reckless," "diversity" means "uniformity," "tolerance" means "intolerance," "inclusive" means "exclusive," and "multi-faith" means "anti-Christian." Once again, I find myself wondering whether our whole approach to justice is fundamentally wrong.