The biggest irony today is that though people know that if they commit a crime or an act of corruption, they will suffer punishment, however, this knowledge raises only a little fear in their minds and it does not act as a total deterrent against crime and thus crime goes on and in order to escape punishment, people commit crime clandestinely or they adopt new ways or search for loopholes in the law or take the protection of those who occupy seats of authority.
People in power talk about the high rate of conviction by courts and many such things, however, if punishment had led to even slow and gradual reduction in crime, then we should have ushered in the Golden Age by now. But! the crime rate and also suffering has increased multifold.
Even if we drop this argument, we find that even today, every single human being on the globe is undergoing some kind of punishment, deprivation or suffering and no one is totally free and liberated. It means that all have violated one or the other law of nature or morality and therefore they are suffering.
And yet this world-wide scenario of suffering, of which everyone is a part, has not made people retract and refrain from crime. As a result of all this, another kind of Law is already taking course and equality before the law is being maintained and the contention that punishment prevents crime has been proved false.
So, the real factor to which individual and collective energies should be bent is man's thoughts. Remember! a person commits crime or sin because of certain negative thoughts, impulses, high tides and ebbs of emotions or unsocial traits in his character. We must realise that richness of character is the most essential and real wealth that raises the value of human life, for, without this, a rich person may have temptations to commit more crime.
Hence, its high time that we understand a fact that introducing new laws and modern ways of policing will not make us a crimeless society or corruption less society, NO! if that was the case, then many developed countries of the world would have been free from these.
We must thus realise that complete freedom from sorrows is the real freedom that can be had by observing the moral laws and that is the real issue to which we must address ourselves and employ our means for.
(The writer is a spiritual educator and popular columnist for publications across India, Nepal and UK. You can write to him at nikunjji@gmail.com)
