RETIRED consultant Tom Lawson became so annoyed with the escalating rate of WA crime, he decided to write and publish a book about it.
Mr Lawson’s book, Justice on the Edge, Crime and Punishment in WA, uses of notoriously hard to track down crime statistics to support his proposals to stymie WA’s rising crime rate.
Crimes against the person have risen dramatically in the past few years. WA has the highest rate of violent crime per capita in Australia.
Shattering the myth that crime is an urban problem, Geraldton appears to be the world’s crime capital.
Mr Lawson said repeat offenders committed 90 per cent of crimes.
“We need to treat the source to prevent repeat offenders getting started in the first place,” he said.
“If that happens, in fifteen to twenty years’ time we’ll see a real drop in the crime rate. In the meantime, we’ll have to treat the symptoms.”
Mr Lawson said the justice system was hopeless at dealing with repeat offenders.
“We should shut the courts for two weeks, lock the judges away and get them to come up with a set of standard sentences, a list of mitigating factors and a set of aggravating factors.”
Mr Lawson is also in favour of a crime triage unit to decide who is likely to be a one-off offender, who will repeat offend and who is probably beyond rehabilitation.
