Further Thoughts on Public Health and Criminal Justice

From follow-up conversations on this.

I agree with your main point. I think the chap has indisputably broken the letter of the grooming law, and must be charged.

That being said, I do think that his inability to engage with truth statements and social politics from a young age should be taken into account in the dispensation of punishment and/or treatment by the courts.

The church, or social club, or family has a role in the management of social deviance. These are tracks of support which are informal, and mostly unregulated by law. The formal tracks are the criminal justice system, the health system, etc.

What I saying is that we need both systems, and multiple tracks of *formally coordinated* support for deviants in society.

It is my hope that many of the punitive treatments in the penal code come under additional legislation, of having to be additionally recommended by clinical psychologists. I literally, at this point, want to have the clinical psychologists run the part of the criminal justice system which has the KPI of reforming the thoughts and feelings of criminals. I want all laws reviewed to give them this power and responsibility.

- Currently we probably don't have enough clinical psychologists to get this done. We probably don't even have a mature enough understanding of these things at the highest levels of policy making. I hope that the Women's/ Family / Human Capital / Law / Religion / Medicine arms of cabinet will form a joint committee to look into this initiative. Other countries are decades ahead, and we may not want to become exactly like them, but it would be good to look into it a little bit.

- I include Religion because it is still an inextricable part of Malaysian politics - any policies formed without those stakeholders are ultimately doomed. The question is never how to cleave between religion and state, but how to involve religion rationally in state. That's the hard problem of running states of religious peoples.

- To tie it all up a bit more: I really do think that crime / psychological deviance / personal preference / good and evil / social norms, are just one huge, long, slippery slope. So that's where my policy preferences come from. People who believe in abstract good and evil are accommodated in my model, but they believe in a different model.