Victorian government: Sentencing policy by SurveyMonkey

So, the State Government’s online sentencing survey has now been released. You, too, can Have Your Say about sentencing in Victoria. 

Laughably, you can Have Your Say via an online survey that could have been made with SurveyMonkey. It will take you 15 minutes, or 5 minutes if your attention span doesn’t stretch that far. You are presented with a series of case studies, some of which are based on ‘actual cases’. For each case study, you have a range of sentencing options from a fine to life imprisonment. There is no option for rehabilitation. There is no option to specify release upon conditions. There is no option for prove & dismiss. There is a “Community Corrections Order” option, which is helpfully described – for those few who can be bothered reading the fine print – as covering everything from rehabilitation programs to electronic monitoring. 

Predictably, the President of the Law Institute cracked the sads, saying that ‘Online surveys are not the way for governments to develop sentencing policy.’ This would be hilarious, except that she had to say it. Now the government has the Sentencing Advisory Council and an absolute pile of peer-reviewed research to help with sentencing policy. But we can’t rely on that sort of namby-pamby, academic, peer-reviewed bollocks. No, SurveyMonkey it is. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the government has decided to make the case studies in the survey utterly misleading. Cases of murder, manslaughter, assault causing serious injury are presented as if they were the prosecution’s case. No mitigating factors, no explanation of motive, no explanation of the offender’s background, no mention of rehabilitation prospects. Just the offender’s actions and their terrible outcomes. In a real case, I can guarantee that the defendant’s lawyer would have been telling the jury about his lifelong struggle with drug addiction, the complex relationship between him and the victim, the pressure he was under to retrieve the money, how he was abused as a kid etc etc etc. The case studies in the survey tell you none of this. On the facts as presented, hell – even I’m in favour of harsh penalties for these low-lifes. 

There’s actually been a bunch of research on exactly this point. If you tell someone that a man grabbed a 75 year old lady’s handbag – pulling her to the ground in the process, breaking her hip and putting her in hospital for weeks – people will generally favour a harsh sentence. If you tell someone that a man grabbed the handbag because his kids hadn’t eaten for three days, he was desperate, he had no intention of hurting the woman and was mortified that she had been so badly injured – well, suddenly people aren’t so keen on locking him up and throwing away the key. 

But this survey only gives you the first, incomplete scenario. It is rigged to produce punitive responses. It is intellectually dishonest, it is bad practice, and it is pathetic. I can only assume that it has been deliberately framed this way (Jeremy certainly does). 

So don’t be surprised when this utterly flawed survey produces results that appear to favour harsher sentences. Don’t be surprised when this utterly flawed survey is cited as evidence that judges are out of touch. Don’t be surprised when this utterly flawed survey is used as the basis of government policy, rather than the academic research that suggests most judges are actually harsher than the ordinary person. 

Well done, DoJ. Well done, Robert Clark. Another victory for stupidity and dishonesty.

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