In his discussion of how British crime statistics have hit an all time high (while the right to self defense has been virtually abolished), Andrew Ian Dodge highlights a nightmarish leftist scenario I'd never heard about before: bringing criminal attackers into hospitals to visit their victims. That way, they can say they're sorry so everyone can live in peace and happiness forever in the "Truth and Reconciliation" world of John Lennon's Imagine fantasy:

As if the victims of knife crime (of whom there were more than 20,000 last year, according to figures released yesterday) do not already suffer enough.

Henceforth, as they are being patched up in hospital, they face the prospect of being visited by the knife-wielders who put them there.

This variation on the theme of restorative justice is designed, according to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, to "shock" young thugs into changing their behaviour by confronting them with the bloody reality of what a stab can do.

It's very easy to roll our eyes and say that it's only Great Britain, but the fact is that there are plenty of leftist crackpots who would drool over the possibility of doing exactly the same thing here.

What I can never figure out is what drives such people. Is it idealism? Or is it malice? Granting them the benefit of the doubt and assuming the former, it's as if they think that everyone is basically good, and that inside every psychopath is a loving human being. And assuming you're a kind and loving person, once you believe that a criminal psychopath is basically just like you inside, it seems quite logical to imagine that if he saw the suffering of his victim in the hospital, he'd feel empathy, say he's sorry, and mend his ways forever. Such naivité is very, very hard for me to comprehend, but I guess it is possible. (In Philadelphia, the Eastern State Penitentiary was originally designed around the idea that criminals would go there to pray and repent. By people who would of course pray and repent if they committed awful crimes.)

Of course, if we attribute malice (of the Marxist totalitarian sort) to the mindset behind this nonsense, it's a lot easier to understand. Criminals are not criminals, but are victims of an affluent capitalist society. And their victims are actually guilty. Of having more. So if the victim suffers more and the criminal suffers less, it's in the interest of building a better world where all are equal, and there is no need for crime. This fits in with the prison abolition movement, and the Stalinist (also Nazi) idea of using psychopathic criminals to deliberately torment political offenders. To be fair, I have to point out that those to whom I impute such malice would not consider Marxism's hatred of capitalist greed to be malicious at all. (Millions of dead notwithstanding.)

Plus, there's the old rule of "never attribute to malice..."

Why, there was even a Stalinist adage, "Mistakes were made."