The statistic is damning, but we must not turn away. If we have any expectation at all of being a civilised country, we must, instead, look behind the shaming figure: more than 1000 patients have maxillo-facial surgery every year as a result of violence in Glasgow alone. Then we must acknowledge that the figure is rising. It means that every six hours, on average, specialist surgeons begin patiently and skilfully to rebuild a face that has been battered, slashed or kicked in an act of mindless brutality. Probably only one-third of these violent crimes are reported to the police. Even so, the official figures show a recent increase in both murders and attempted murders.

Law and order is a staple of any election. Every politician who asks the public for their vote promises to crack down on crime. This Scottish Parliament election is no exception: the proposals before us range from recruiting large numbers of new police officers and building more prisons, to tougher community sentences and putting more effort into preventing crime.

More police officers and tougher penalties for criminals are vote-winners, because anyone who advocates them is clearly on the side of the good guys. Arguing that what we should do with the bad guys is to get them to see the error of their ways and return them to play a constructive part in society does not lend itself to the catchy soundbite. Nor does acknowledging that one year's downturn in the murder statistics does not mean they won't go up again the next year. Particular areas of concern range from cheap alcohol to control of air guns and knives to drug testing in prisons and youth crime. Whatever their party allegiance, our political activists want to make the world a better place, and it is notable that a common feature this time is more drug rehabilitation.

Yet the public whose taxes pay for police, prisons and emergency surgery know that we have a problem which is deep-rooted and intractable.

Sometimes, as the bard pointed out, seeing oorsels as ithers see us is particularly instructive. The American criminologist, Professor Elliot Currie, is no stranger to violent crime. After a tour of Govan, where knife crime is again blighting many young lives, he said: "To stomp some other kid to death you really have to live among some extreme bleakness of life."

We should listen and we should tell our would-be MSPs that it is that bleakness and alienation that we want them to tackle, even though there is no simple fix.

Of course, there must be sentences that act as deterrents, but they do not - and cannot - deter people who have so little self-regard that they walk out of hospital without waiting for an eight-centimetre long split in their cheek to be stitched. Without a basic self-esteem, there can be no empathy for anyone else and that is dangerous far beyond the reach of simple "lock-em-up" electioneering.