Thomas Sowell’s latest column goes crisply to the heart of a common fallacy, that crime and education spending are substitutable.

I wish he’d sourced his figures, but they are in line with the only comprehensive New Zealand study of the costs of crime. NZIER’s draft report can be found, but the government stopped it there. It would have told us that crime costs (control, precautions and victim losses) amounted in the 1990s to over 5% of GDP. It would be around $8 billion today.

[Update – That is plainly a gross under-estimate. A Treasury working paper put the 2003-2004 cost at $9.1 billion of which $7 billion was private cost and loss. Thanks Eric Crampton (whose comment below alerted me to this). I wish I’d come across that paper when I was an MP ]

If only prison and educaton costs were substitutable.  19th and 20th century progressives were firmly convinced that once wealth was spread properly, so that even the poor could read and write, the criminal classes would be educated out of crime. It seemed a reasonable expectation. Sadly, the facts have mugged that hope, just as they stabbed the belief that crime would wither when everyone had a home and enough to eat and wear. The latter took a beating when depression and recession statistics showed reductions, not increases in crime. Still, many progressives believe in their hearts that violent predation is an understandable class reaction to poverty, and we have just not been nice enough for long enough to criminals to test their theories properly.

Sowell mentions David Fraser, who will visit New Zealand this year as a guest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Fraser has infuriated the self anointed criminal justice elite by lookng at the actual results of their goofy theories, rather than their fond hopes. Worst of all he insists on ignoring the other great progressive fallacy,  that penal policy should be measured by its success in rehabilitation.

The only valid measure is in fact change in crime and victimisation rates.

The international evidence is overwhelming. Rehabilitation happens, but for adults it is almost always spontaneous (no positive effect of programmes and release policies). Rehabilitation is a seductive but distracting primary goal for penal policy. Sadly it has become the only goal of New Zealand’s justice anointed. In the face of failure they redouble their effort, and the shrillness of their denunciation of doubting unbelievers.

While they fail victims suffer our spectacular increases in violent crime rates.