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Polemic on rising crime in South Africa — and some solutions.

With more than 50 murders in an average day and a total of nearly 200,000 robberies a year, few would argue that South Africa's crime rate is anything other than appalling.

A person in South Africa is 20 times more likely to be murdered than someone in Western Europe and 80 times more likely than someone in Japan.

No wonder then that, as anyone who has visited South Africa will know, violent crime is now a national obsession.

Houses are surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences and signs everywhere warn potential criminals that they will be met with an "armed response" if they try anything.

Given such state of affairs, this polemic by Antony Altbeker, who has spent more than ten years as a criminologist doing such things as shadowing detectives, is particularly timely.

Altbeker opens by recounting his own terrifying experience of crime: He was in a fast food restaurant held up by armed thugs and only survived because the gun belonging to one of the criminals jammed.

A main argument presented in A Country At War With Itself: South Africa's Crisis of Crime is that violent crime has become common because of a culture of violence that feeds on itself. If so many other people are robbing and murdering — so the argument goes — then it becomes easier for others to cross the mental divide from a law-abiding individual to a criminal and do the same.

Altbeker feels that this culture of violence partly stems from the end of the hated apartheid system in 1994, which he says set many young men adrift in a brave new world that lacked the societal checks to teach them the difference between right and wrong.

Altbeker insists that, to reduce the tide of violent crime, the authorities should stop focusing their efforts on community policing or the idea that by being visible officers they can prevent crime. Instead, he says, the priority should be on tracking down criminals and jailing them for long periods.

While the prison populations of the United Kingdom and the United States have risen dramatically in recent decades, Altbeker says the increase in the number of people behind bars in South Africa has not been fast enough when compared with the explosion in crime rates in the country.

Altbeker advocates a doubling of the prison population and to help achieve this he believes that detective operations, which he describes as having been run down and marginalised relative to uniformed police work, should be given higher priority.

At times, the author turns to what could be described as amateur psychology and sociology in his discussions of the present malaise and he has a tendency to draw blanket conclusions in a slightly unscientific manner.

Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful book that provides some valuable possible solutions to the present state of affairs in South Africa.