On Sunday afternoon I'll be in Auckland to chair a public discussion of  the secrecy that justice insiders defend so tenaciously. Derryn Hinch is the main speaker. He's endured prison to stand up for open courts and freedom of speech.

Doing my homework, I've been reminded of the intellectual blindness engendered by the beliefs of well meaning people.  Kim Workman is a good man. He writes thoughtfully on his blog "Smart on Crime". The post prompted by the absurd discharge of the Maori prince is worth reading by anyone who needs to understand the criminal justice establishment. They need to feel morally superior (compassion is their claim) over the rest of us, but they acknowledge the need also for research on their side.

So how do they end up so far from reality? This well written piece shows us. The reasoning is respectable so far as it goes, but it stops well before it gets anywhere near the main issues. It misses the same point as is missed by the justice insiders generally.

It measures everything according to its potential to redeem the offender. Redemption is worth trying if it does not prejudice more necessary purposes. But the fate of particular offenders is trivial, when the proper measure of a justice system, indeed any social mechanism for inculcating and upholding norm observance, is the extent of offending overall. Recidivism rates may affect offending rates, but they are much less important than rates of recruitment to offending.

Governments have few research proven tools to reliably reform hardened offenders. Once a young person establishes a pattern they are likely to keep offending until they grow out of it (now in the early forties). They offend whenever they think the price will be less than the rewards they get (including the psychic rewards of causing fear).

So crime rates are determined largely by recruitment to offender status, not 'cure rates' for established offenders.

Almost all cultures rely heavily on reputation mechanisms to discourage the establishment of such patterns. They commonly involve exacting a price over the long term from individuals, their families, and communities that harbour them. They also commonly provide well recognised paths to discharge the shame burden, to demonstrate remorse. As Kim Workman acknowledges, Maori norm enforcement relied heavily on whakaama – shame. What he does not go on to acknowledge was the extent to which shame mechanisms need practical impacts and 'stigmatization'. They depend on tangible consequences to shameful behaviour. Whakaama (shame) becomes irrelevant and toothless when it is separated from the consequences, when the forgiveness carrots are poured out in sackloads without any sticks of  ritual humiliation, group responsibility and formulaic depredaton (muru and utu)..

But well meaning 'sickly white liberals' (in Winston Peters' memorable words) have gutted our law of its links with reputation sanctions. They've left the law struggling ineffectually to rely on formal punishments alone.

So Mr Workman, when you deplore the powerful trend toward more severity in punishments, when you rail against the lack of recognition of the truth that speed and certainty of consequence are much more important than severity in deterrence, take a look at your own responsibility. You've helped eliminate from our law the most powerful and speedy social sanctions of all at the critical time (in application to young people).

Rethinking Justice applauds the secrecy of our youth courts. You defend our disgraceful name suppression law. You supported the Clean Slate law. And in your blog you whine about the ordinary peoples' rejection of the expert demand that criminal justice policy be left to experts. You exemplify the establishment's comprehensive rejection of the reputation based natural social sanctions.

You genuinely believe you have research and reason on your side, but it is fatally limited. Your post on Paki takes the shame analysis no further than the effect of shame on rehabilitation prospects. Shame may inhibit rehabilitation for offenders outside a community with high social cohesion (i.e. where the social sanctions are presumably severe, and scope for collective redemptive support). But where is the consciousness of its importance to offending rates?

Justice insiders have an unshakeable conviction that the system is all about them and the offender. And that gets nicely boiled down to focus on the superiority of the insider's compassion and morality. So, for example, you judge prison effectiveness by the re-offending rate of released prisoners. Prison does not rehabilitate. So what? That is not news. It never has. Spontaneous rehabilitation occurs at much the same rates almost irrespective of the programmes in prisons, as you know.

Rehabilitation is only the least important and the least likely to be achieved of the four objectives of imprisonment. I suspect much the same for shame as a sanction. Some will not re-offend having tasted the price of wrongdoing. Some will be undeterred. The important thing is that we are unlikely to know in advance, and even if we thought we did know, if offends the need for justice to apply equally to all, for some to get 'treatment' and others punishment.

The far more substantial reasons for punishment are to deter others, to protect others by incapacitating offenders from further predation, and to deliver retributive justice to the victims. Those factors are all about unknown potential victims and actual victims, and potential offenders.

But justice insiders dismiss the interests of innnocent others as immaterial.

Naming and shaming is important for all those third party purposes. What Mr Workman labels "stigmatisation'  is important in deterrence. The key insight of James Q Wilson, the philosopher who explained why Broken Windows policies work, was that the system must make plain what conduct is actually costly. Any law that is not enforced undemines respect for law generally. What is tolerated without high cost is perceived as permissible. Notional law is irrelevant compared to the actuality of 'what goes on (is acceptable) around here'. Like it or not, we all need to see stigmatisation in action to know the difference between official pretenses about what is acceptable and the actuality of what behaviour 'works' and what does not.

Put another way, openness about genuine punishment has a deterrent effect on those who might be tempted to think that offending is essentially costless, or at least that the cost will be less than the satisfaction Openness protects others by allowing people to know who they should take precautions with, and it involves all who know the offenders in monitoring them; Openness and deliberate shaming may be important to the recovery of victims. They need to know that the world is on their side.

Most notions of justice in most cultures affirm the need to balance wrongdoing. We have a deep sense that wrongdoers should not be permitted to be in a better position than their victims at the end of society's process. In east Asian culture that is given a theological explanation, the restoration of harmony in the heavens, by making sure that wrongdoing is balanced by harm to the wrongdoer. In our history it was more simply expressed, there must be a deterrent price paid for each crime that satisfies the legitimate and vitally important social need to see retributive justice done, for victims.

As purposes of punishment, (including reputation based informal consequences) those other reasons are more important than the redemption of individual offenders. That is particularly problematic for Mr Workman. He wants therapeutic processes to have priority despite practical knowledge that there are many offenders who will never be redeemed, and there is no reliable way to know in advance who will be redeemed.  His preferred therapies will therefore always be discredited afer application. Experience of failed compassion erodes trust in the law, and authority generally. It impels us toward self-help mechanisms, even up to vigilante action.

Despite the establishment's self congratulation over its redemptive intentions, they are primarily responsible for the increasingly punitive trend of legislative change. They have forfeited trust that the establishment is committed to law that works, that cheats won't prosper, that honesty pays.

Mr Workman will be ognored for whittering for so long as he tries to persuade us by claims about what is best for the offenders and their rehabilitation, without understanding that we are barely interested in offenders, their feelings, their families' feelings.

Nor are we interested in the elite's wish to look merciful. We are interested in;

• the marginal offender who needs to be dissuaded, and
• the next victim who need not be a victim, and
• upholding the victims' right to see the price exacted, by a state and a community on the victim's side, not the offenders'.

Smart on Crime's theories have had their time, been tried and found wanting. As well as rejecting reputation mechanisms you've rejected punishment for its own sake as a proper objective of justice. But we are a democracy, and the people do not reject punishment as a purpose for a justice system that expropriates the victim's right to retribution.

We do not want to be left where there is no fear muscular shame at the entry levels of criminal life. We are realistic. The law cannot work with only formal coercion (custody and fines) to do the heavy lifting.  And you want to replace even what is left of shame and stigmatisation with therapeutic treatments. They do not fulfil the main purposes of punishment. So your establishment has forfeited the entitlement to respect from the people that is both the requirement and the justification for an establishment to lead.