As governments worldwide cut back on prison numbers to save money, New Zealand is headed in the other direction, counter-intuitively cutting back on rehabilitation services, which will increase repeat offending and lead to more cost to the taxpayer.
“Tough on crime” really means “tough on taxpayer”
Prison reform works like the stock exchange: nations like New Zealand and Australia normally take their lead from the USA, and follow the current trend as it emerges.
Which is why developments in NZ are particularly alarming at the moment, because the country is going head-on against world trends at what will be great cost to individual New Zealanders…and possibly, by osmosis, to Australians, for politicians have an unfortunate habit of picking up the wrong examples from overseas.
It seems that “law and order” has gone rabid in NZ. ‘Rabid’ is the phase when politicians and the media encourage one another to ever-increasing levels of heightened outrage, usually basing an entire policy on one criminal case of a particularly heinous variety.
Australia, and certainly the states of Australia, are subject to the same pernicious and slippery slope of penal logic that appears to be infecting New Zealand.
“Crime’s up; we must have more police; we must lock more people away; crime will fall”.
Of those four pseudo-tenets, only the fact that crime rates could be up might be accurate. However, crime rates have been falling throughout the western world for two decades so it is even questionable whether “crime’s up” is accurate when figures for an extended period – even if that period is as short as year-on-year – are considered, instead of just one outrageous case.
But, if crime is up, why on earth as a government would you create more police? If crime is up, the existing police force has FAILED in its duty to the nation. If you reward them every time they fail, you’ll soon end up with more police in NZ than Rugby fans.
Any government’s answer to rising crime should be to manage the police to work smarter. Providing more police and locking more criminals away is just about the dumbest thing a government can do. It costs a fortune, and produces more crime in the long run (see below).
The more people you lock up, the more each taxpayer has to pay to:
- build new prisons
- employ more warders
- keep prisoners locked away in jail, and
- fund the range of ancillary services that prisons – because they are ‘wards’ of the state – must be supplied with.
How much does that cost? In New Zealand it has been put at $A47,300 ($NZ61,800) a year in 2005 (source: NZ Hansard, 17 November 2009). In Australia a very recent, authoritative report says it costs about $A270 a day ($NZ350) or about $A100,000 ($NZ130,000) a year (source: Report on Government Services 2010, Productivity Comm, Canberra, Jan. 2010: 8.1 to 8.48).
Cutting off nose…
With these costs in the back of your mind, consider that the NZ Government is planning to cut off its nose to spite its colon. The government is threatening prisoner rehabilitation – and thus public safety – by slashing funding to The Prisoners’ Aid and Rehabilitation Society (PARS: http://www.pars.org.nz)
PARS is funded by the NZ Department of Corrections to support prisoners and their families within prison and upon release. About 500 volunteers actively support its work, which until now has been funded by a $NZ2.4m ($A1.8m) contract with the Department.
Prisons don’t stop offenders re-offending: quite the reverse, as they are ‘crime universities’ from which unrepentant inmates emerge to commit more, bigger and ‘better’ crimes: only rehabilitation programs can help stop recidivism, and such programs are like hen’s teeth inside prison.
But now rehabilitation is under threat. The governing National Party used to have a reasonable prisons policy, at least in terms of rehabilitation: http://national.org.nz/files/2008/prisons_policy.pdf But it is apparently planning to cancel its contract with PARS: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/politics/3376142/Outlook-bleak-for-prisoners-aid-group and http://www.thestandard.org.nz/nats-kill-another-crim-rehabilitation-scheme/
The prisons policy is under stress because National is in coalition with the minority right-wing ACT Party whose “law and order” spokesperson, David Garrett, has recently advocated paying abusive parents to be sterilized: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/04/2836812.htm and has a long history of similar outbursts. He is previously on record as saying that freedom from homosexual prison rape is a "creature comfort" to which prisoners are not entitled:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0903/S00131.htm
National seem willing to abandon their stance on police and prisons to the ACT Party, having just supported the introduction of ACT’s "three strikes" law against a raft of advice including that of its own Justice Ministry: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/3342452/Three-strikes-policy-advice-blocked
The situation is not helped by National having a Police and Corrections Minister who seems to enjoy being referred to as Judith ‘Crusher’ Collins (after her pledge to crush ‘hoon’ cars).
In NZ, PARS was incorporated in 1959 (though it existed in earlier forms since 1880). It has proven to be a cost-effective means of ensuring prisoners are helped to adjust to life after release…or, looked at from a “tough on law and order” viewpoint, reduced their incentive to reoffend. And that’s helped keep generations of New Zealanders safe in their homes and the streets.
PARS has been supported and funded by governments of all persuasions for 51 years. The current government seems prepared to reject the judgment of all its predecessors and leave prisoners with no community support other than what they can find themselves. And for many, that’s nothing.
Perhaps NZ might like to consider some recent advice from three well-placed experts from the State of NSW. Former judges Harold Sperling, Tony Fitzgerald, and Chris Geraghty have joined academics and defence lawyers to argue for change in thinking about NSW prisons.
They are lobbying for ”justice reinvestment” policies starting to operate in the USA. The policies concentrate on spending money to reduce numbers in prison and to cut repeat offending.
CLA has been saying for some time that “tough on crime” policies are really “tough on taxpayers” – they don’t cut either crime rates or fear of crime in the community.
Without change, the lawyers and academics say, NSW must build a medium-sized prison annually or a large prison every two years to maintain its growing prison population.
Prisoner numbers in NSW grew by almost 5% in 2008-9 and have increased by more than 4% each year since ”truth-in-sentencing” reforms of 1999. The operating costs and capital expenditure of the NSW prison system has topped $A1bn ($NZ1.3bn), more than one-third of the amount spent on all prisons throughout Australia.
NSW has twice as many prisoners as the State of Victoria, almost twice the rate of imprisonment and four times as many custodial facilities – 57 compared to 14. http://tiny.cc/eXbGf
Problem is universal
NZ and every Australian state and territory where “law and order” politicians have pumped up media outrage in lead-ups to elections for decades has exactly the same type of prison population problem as NSW.
We need some statesmen and women in parliaments, rather than politicians who think the answer to crime is cutting rehabilitation and creating new laws. Going down that route produces the UK dilemma: British Labour has introduced 14,300 new offences since taking office in 1997, with current Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s administration inventing crimes at more than one a day.
More crimes, more police, more prisoners, more prisons. More tax.
And, reverting to the intro to this item, what is the USA doing about its prison population? State after State – particularly the bankrupt California, where Governor Schwarzenegger used to be the toughest of the “tough on crime” advocates – is winding back prisoner numbers because they can no longer afford the excessive, counter-productive “law and order” consequences of shallow-thinking politicians.
When commonsense is needed, NZ appears to be starting down a path, by cutting rehabilitation and introducing the ‘three strikes’ policy, in precisely the opposite direction to where it’s policy and its economy should be headed.
“Tough on crime” really means “tough on taxpayer”.
– By Bill Rowlings, CEO of Civil Liberties Australia
Anyone concerned about the trend in NZ could:
Email the Minister: j.collins@ministers.govt.nz
or, write a Letter to the Editor to:
- The Dominion Post (Wellington) letters@dompost.co.nz
- The NZ Herald (Auckland) letters@nzherald.co.nz