PAUL O'MAHONY's book has something to infuriate everybody - yet it is a valuable contribution to the debate about crime.

Formerly a research psychologist with the Department of Justice, then a lecturer with Trinity College Dublin, O'Mahony is now a writer and researcher on criminal justice issues. His book presents information and statistics on the issue of crime in Ireland but it also presents his own passionately held beliefs.

His advocacy of the value of therapy and rehabilitation will raise the blood pressure of the macho brigade - or it would if they were to read the book.

His apparent belief that the trauma suffered by victims should not be taken into account in sentencing has the capacity to raise the blood pressure of everybody. In the chapter on sexual crime he writes:

"Justice becomes highly questionable if it punishes a lesser offence more severely than a serious offence because the lesser offence happens to have more damaging effects on the specific victim. Such effects are usually unintended and unpredictable and a function of the personality and circumstances of the victim."

O'Mahony puts forward a good argument for the decriminalisation of illegal drugs. Decriminalisation in the Netherlands, he notes, has been accompanied by a fall in the number of young people starting to use heroin and other opiates and a fall in the number of addicts becoming infected with HIV.

We, on the other hand, are creating the sort of Prohibition like conditions which boosted the growth of organised crime in the United States and which we already see happening here. Decriminalisation would take the focus off policing and put it on to prevention and treatment, two areas in which we are disgracefully lacking.

O'Mahony is especially scathing about the waste of Garda time and resources on, intercepting and seizing cannabis at a time when people are dying from heroin related illnesses.

He also points to the difficulty of getting a hearing from young people if our first act is to tell them that cannabis is harmful, a proposition which undermines our credibility from the word go. O'Mahony believes that scaremongering about ecstasy is equally harmful to our efforts to get young people to believe us.

This suggests the thought (and if it offends, it is this reviewer and not O'Mahony who should be attacked for it): the death of one middle class teenager from Ecstasy counts for more in the eyes of the media than the death of a hundred youngsters from the inner cities.

That is one of the many reasons why it will be a long time before we tire sufficiently of the cops and robbers nonsense which has succeeded nowhere in defeating drug abuse and instead cut the ground from under the drug barons by decriminalising.

"An overnight conversion to a policy of decriminalisation is not a realistic option at present, not only because of Irish public opinion, but also because of the strong international prohibitionist ideology to which Ireland is wedded," O'Mahony acknowledges.

This book ranges across a wide spectrum of topics, among them civil liberties, the prison system, the Garda and violence.

It is not a polemic: it provides many, many facts and as such is a most useful source book. It also gives us O'Mahony's passionately argued interpretation of these facts. It is not one of those books in which the author pretends to present a "neutral" analysis. The reader should be thankful that it is not, firstly because it is a great deal more honest and useful for the author to let us know what he thinks, and secondly because it makes for a more interesting read.