I am really pleased that the Government has said no to the new mega prison planned for Waikeria. The prison would have been a retrograde step, continued New Zealand’s failure to address the causes of crime and sucked in huge amounts of resources that could be used to deal with poverty.
From Radio New Zealand:
Plans to build a new mega-prison at Waikeria have been scrapped, but the government has yet to decide what to do instead.
The Corrections Department is waiting for the government to report back on its proposal to build a 3000-bed prison in rural Waikato.
It would be the largest prison in the country.
The government has repeatedly delayed its response, but Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis confirmed on Sunday that the large-scale option had been taken off the table.
“We will not be building a mega prison,” he said in a statement.
However, he left the door open to a smaller expansion, saying a final decision on the proposal was still pending.
“We will take action, but it will be considered and not reactive… I will be making a decision, but I want to make the right one for all those affected.”
The problem the country is facing is that under current legal and policy settings the prison population is going up and the system is close to capacity.
A great deal of the problem is the change in bail laws passed in 2013 by National.
It caused the number of people on remand, that is people who had not been found guilty of anything, to increase from 1,800 to 3,000.
The latest report has the total prison muster at 10,394.
It has been clear for years that this problem was becoming more and more of an issue. But apart from gleefully proposing more and more changes akin to double bunking the last Government’s proposals and decisions were rather minimal.
And Andrew Little, whose decision making in Justice has been extraordinarily good, has said that he wants that this government wants to reduce the prison population. He has asked for advice on the bail laws and change is likely. He has said:
We are going to have to have a look at this because what is happening and the consequences of that change in the bail laws is we’re getting way more people banged up in prison, and they haven’t even been convicted yet, they’re there on remand, than was intended when that bail law was first introduced.
It would be great for a political consensus to be reached on this most important issue. But the chances are slim.
The approach is perfectly consistent with Labour’s policy of reducing the prison muster by 30% over 15 years. But on the right Simon O’Connor has described the move as being ideological.
Law and order has been increasingly the attention of different media outlets in preparation for what will be an important public discussion.
There was this coverage by the outstanding David Fisher to provide a detailed analysis of the subject and comment from some major players.
He sought views from different people.
He received this from Garth McVicar:
McVicar rejects the notion the scientific research is correct and warns about seeking out the same expert advice relied on before the Sensible Sentencing Trust emerged.
As McVicar tells it – and this is in contradiction to the graphs, statistics and peer-reviewed research in Gluckman’s report – academics and scientists had led New Zealand into a crime-ridden society until the “evolution” of the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
“How can Gluckman be right when all he’s doing is going back to prior 2001 or 2000? How can he be right?”
McVicar says – and Gluckman’s report says this is not true – longer sentences, tougher bail laws and making parole more difficult to obtain have led to the fall in our crime rate.
Gluckman’s report was simply the chief science adviser “running off his mouth without having any conclusive evidence to prove what he had to say”.
McVicar doesn’t accept the report and says the 149 inter-linked research references “don’t support what he’s saying”.
Apart from intellectuals uncritically changing everything that has been written about crime over the past few decades I suspect the prospects of agreement are remote.
Peter Gluckman may as well have been in a different dimension such was his take of the view. He was reported in these terms:
Gluckman said the prisons report – as an example – gives the public information to make a decision. If we choose to continue to run our justice system the same way, more people will be locked up who will eventually be released, “brutalised” by prison and “over time we will escalate the crime rate”.
And as we do that, we need to recognise our society is not doing enough to stop people entering prison, or if they do go to prison, to shift the focus of their imprisonment to rehabilitation so they can join society in a positive way.
Our other option is to recognise many in prison have “lifetime diagnosable mental illness or substance-use disorder”, many are there “because of social circumstances which put them on the trajectory towards unfortunate and harmful outcomes for society”.
And, he says, there should be greater effort expended to stop people ending up in the justice system at all.
And Andrew Little gave this painful yet utterly realistic description of the current system:
If the purposes of having longer sentences and things like ‘three strikes’ is that it acts as a disincentive, clearly the evidence says it is not.”
Little said young men, like many who become regulars in the prison system, do not “stand around with criminal intent” and calculate how to commit a crime so as to get a lesser sentence, or to avoid a “strike”.
“They don’t do that. If they see an opportunity, or they are high as a kite or whatever, they go and offend.”
At the same time, many in prison suffer addiction, mental health and other issues which has been tied directly to criminal offending.
“Unless we start to deal with those issues, we are failing. We are failing members of the public who just become those guys’ next victims.
“It’s not the length of time a serious offender spends in prison. It’s what happens when they are there.
“More and more time isn’t going to fix them.” If the underlying issues aren’t addressed, “we haven’t made it any better for them”.
“We’ve just recycling them through the system.”
Fisher’s article attracted the attention of a particular person who has more than a nodding acquaintance with the criminal justice system, particularly the treatment of those who steal the identities of dead babies.
Fisher’s write up of this person‘s response is one of the most entertaining things you will read.
Some highlights:
Former Act MP and lawyer David Garrett sent a string of abusive text messages last night in support of McVicar and championing the “Three Strikes” law he designed and got through Parliament.
“The self-described ‘cow cocky’ from Hawke’s Bay” has had 100 times the influence you and your mates have ever had … and I know that burns like f***,” said Garrett.
In a later text, he said McVicar “frustrates the left hugely … because a self-described ‘cow cocky from Hawke’s Bay’ has been so hugely influential” …
“You are a grade one tosser,” Garrett told this reporter. “You know very well there is excellent evidence that 3S (Three Strikes) works superbly as a specific deterrent to the 9000-odd first strikers.”
But it appears that the evidence Garrett was relying on was not so pristine.
Garrett, who said this month he had provided legal advice to the trust for 15 years, then presented statistics apparently showing the law had a proven deterrent effect.
The statistics had been sourced by criminal defence lawyer Graeme Edgeler for a post on the Public Address blog and then analysed further on the statistics blog run by University of Auckland statistics Professor Thomas Lumley.
Although the posts initially formed the view Three Strikes could be statistically shown to have worked, Garrett appeared unaware both Edgeler and Lumley had since withdrawn their comments, having found they were based on bad data from the Ministry of Justice.
But wait there was more.
Garrett scanned a print out of the outdated blog post – the date of printing was shown as October 2015 – and emailed it saying he expected to “watch you go mysteriously silent – can’t be publishing anything that blows your own argument, eh?”
Garrett continued texting, peppering his communications with various personal insults.
After sending the print out of Lumley’s outdated blogpost, he wrote: “How to make a dickhead go quiet – send him some stats from someone he has already acknowledged as authoritative … instant silence … too funny.”
During the texts, Garrett said: “I am well aware this exchange is on the record.
But then the penny dropped after David Fisher pointed out to Garrett the problem with the data and the analysis:
Garrett reposting: “I stand corrected.”
He said he would seek fresh statistics from the Ministry of Justice.However, he said “deterrence was only ever seen as a bonus” as the law was aimed at “incapacitation of thoroughly bad people so they can’t hurt the rest of us”.
“That in itself is good enough for me. Deterrence would be a bonus.”
This highlights a problem when debating with the right. If they have some evidence, any evidence, that will support their prejudices they will wield this like a weapon. And it does not matter how many reports run counter to their beliefs because they are all wrong.
Whereas our response on the left would be “wow new data, what does it mean and does it validate or challenge my current beliefs?”
At least Garrett had the decency to admit he was wrong about the data.
Although he still thinks the three strikes law is a good idea.
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