What's Gone Wrong? Some try to understand, others just condemn

WHAT politicians and others have said about crime in the past week:

Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less - John Major

Those committed to a new 21st century welfare state have to cease . . . paternalistic and well-meaning indulgence of thuggery, noise, nuisance, and anti-social behaviour - David Blunkett, shadow Health Secretary

If we want children to know right from wrong, the first thing to do is teach them to pray - William Rees-Mogg, chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council

Children of 12 and 13 are being made into scapegoats, even an enemy within . . . Most people who commit a minor offence as a child or teenager just grow out of it - Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform

It is no good permanently finding excuses for a section of the population who are essentially nasty pieces of work - Kenneth Clarke, Home Secretary

The Sixties and Seventies were times when the churches were mocked and our message was thought to be old-fashioned and irrelevant . . . what was sowed then is being reaped now - the Archbishop of Canterbury

There is no evidence of some new juvenile crime wave in Britain - Simon Jenkins, 'Times' columnist

We believe that violence develops from a decline in standards of personal responsibility and respect for others. This is aggravated by the easy availability of violent pornography . . . and particularly the promotion of violence on TV - All-party motion, sponsored by David Alton, the Liberal Democrat MP, calling for Royal Commission on violence

The family is . . . with all its miseries, the best thing we've ever devised . . . based not on negotiated, individualistic, hedonistic notions but on the idea that there's something bigger than you or me - a sacred institution. And here we find it invaded comprehensively by all the notions of contract . . . We can start a child going; we might or might not go on with it . . . And it seems to me that that is a hopeless situation, that we're in fact going to ruin the future - Professor A H Halsey, Oxford University sociologist

The way that some people have wallowed in an orgy of self-analysis, self-pity and self-recrimination . . . and talked in terms of 'a moral chaos' engulfing us is pathetic. Crime is associated with poverty and destitution - Robert Kilroy- Silk, TV presenter

Little prisons for little twoccers (car thieves)? Holiday camps, that's all they'll be - Carl, a Yorkshire teenager