Filling the prisons

BY JOHN MCCRONE

New Zealand locks up people at a rate of 199 per 100,000. The European average is about 80. Even Australia, our convict cousin, jails a third less than we do, according to figures from the International Centre for Prison Studies.

Tuesday afternoon in Christchurch District Court. A 26-year-old with broad shoulders stretching his dingy white T-shirt stands in the dock, lips pursed, eyes focused on the middle distance, unable to decide whether to hold his hands in front or behind him.

After crossing backwards and forwards a few times, he eventually settles on behind his back.

Court No2 feels weighed down by its windowless aquarium lighting. The air conditioning hums. There is a rustle of legal files and an occasional clunk from the clerk's stapler. The judge delicately licks a forefinger to turn a page of the documents before him. No-one is paying the defendant any attention.

Finally the judge summarises the bare facts. A succession of attacks on his mother. Slaps and punches. Sent to jail last year and now another string of five charges, including several assaults while on bail and barred by a protection order.

The mother has written a sorrowful letter to the court on crumpled paper, explaining the chaotic family relationship. The judge notes its highlights. Alcohol a constant factor. The pair were celebrating the son finally moving to his own flat. "A few drinks and it all went downhill from there," the judge remarks.

In her letter, the mother now pleads that her son should be given community detention and put into a treatment programme. An assessment for schizophrenia is mentioned. Prison is comfortable for her son, she says, stabilising his thought processes. The court could take the view that having to face the real world might be more of a punishment.

The logic sounds twisted, but the family dynamic seems clear enough.

Peering over his spectacles at the defendant, the judge says: "I have a problem with the message that would send." So prison, once more, is what it has to be. A year and seven months. Three months, four months and 12 months cumulatively on the various charges.

The man's eyes are suddenly red and teary. He shakes his head in voiceless protest. Then a door opens and smoothly he is whisked away.

Truth in sentencing. Life should mean life. Three strikes and you're out. Catch-phrases that seem to go down well with the Kiwi public. There is something strangely punitive about our national psyche. Among Western countries, we are second only to the United States in the numbers we are happy to send to prison.

New Zealand locks up people at a rate of 199 per 100,000. The European average is about 80. Even Australia, our convict cousin, jails a third less than we do, according to figures from the International Centre for Prison Studies.

New Zealand is simply way out of line in this regard. It does not seem to tally with our national self-image at all.

"Yes, we like to think of ourselves as relaxed, informal, egalitarian, welcoming – all these things," says Victoria University criminologist John Pratt. "But at the same time, we like putting lots of people in prison."

It does not fit with our view of ourselves as social pioneers, a "little Scandinavia" of pragmatic, evidence-based, social policies. It does not even fit with traditional Kiwi thriftiness because our incarceration rates cost us a bomb.

Finance Minister Bill English made this clear last month when he revealed the price of a runaway prison system. "[It's] our fastest growing portfolio," he said. "Corrections will be, in two or three years, the largest government department, bigger than the Ministry of Social Development or the Inland Revenue Department."

It cost taxpayers $90,000 a year to keep a person in prison, he said. And every extra prison bed built represents another $250,000 in capital spending.

Yet a crash building programme is under way because, at least partly due to "get tough" measures like ACT's three-strikes law, the prison population is expected to soar from 8400 to 12,500 by 2018. As well as a six-storey redevelopment of Auckland's Mt Eden Prison and the 60-bed cell block built out of shipping containers at Rimutaka Prison in Upper Hutt, there are plans for a new 1000-bed jail to be built and run by private enterprise at Wiri, in South Auckland.

"We're the second most incarcerated country in the developed world, but do we think we're really the second most wicked?" asks Jarrod Gilbert, advocate for the Christchurch-based Howard League for Penal Reform.

ONE OF the critical moments that led to imprisonment becoming such a growth industry was the 1999 law and order referendum, a citizens' vote sparked by the brutal attack on the 70-year-old mother of current Christchurch Deputy Mayor Norm Withers. She was minding his suburban menswear shop when she was beaten up with a jack handle by a man out on parole for armed robbery and with more than 40 previous convictions.

Ninety-two per cent voted for victim rights and tougher sentencing for violent offenders. Prof Pratt believes the referendum brought to the surface "the dark side of paradise" – the anxieties and insecurities that are the other aspect of the New Zealand character.

New Zealand – at least Pakeha New Zealand – was born of the dream of being the best of the old country, all the social problems left behind to make a fresh start, he says. From the beginning, there was an urge for homogeneity and orderliness that went with the egalitarianism and village-scale friendliness.

Even in the 1930s, commentators noted how quick New Zealand was to lock up people for crimes such as drunkenness and vagrancy. One wrote: "New Zealand has on the whole very little serious crime. Its prisons, nonetheless, are always full to overflowing."

By the 1990s, the dream of paradise was really sliding. Rogernomics, land marches, stock market crashes. There was an unnerving awareness of being a very small country at the bottom of the world, Prof Pratt says.

"The result has been a perfect storm for populism. People have an exaggerated sense of danger. So in the last 10 years, it's as if Labour and National have been in a law and order auction during elections."

Labour justice spokeswoman Lianne Dalziel agrees. She says the 1999 referendum gave Labour little choice but to campaign on the mantra "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime". Public feeling meant the choice was between hard and harder. There followed the Bail Act 2000, Sentencing Act 2002 and Parole Act 2002, all resulting in more and longer sentences.

Ms Dalziel says the question should have been "what actually makes our communities safer?". And the evidence across the world is that sending people to prison, especially the young and salvageable, is not the answer. "If you put a young person in jail, the likelihood of them becoming a recidivist offender is increased exponentially. And why is that? It's because they're mixing with already hardened criminals."

Most would accept that crime is the result of addictions, mental ill-health, a bad start in life, poverty and other social factors, rather than because people are inherently evil, she says. So these are the issues we should be targeting with preventative and rehabilitative measures.

She has travelled to see what she calls inspiring examples of what other countries are doing, such as the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in the Melbourne suburb of Yarra. A district court has been set up as part of a community centre, with social workers and other agencies in the same building. A wraparound approach, she says.

Yet in New Zealand, the call of lobby groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust is still for greater deterrence. Make the penalties so harsh that criminals think twice – when the problem is that they don't even think once, Ms Dalziel says.

The latest raising of the stakes has been the three strikes law, a policy concession to ACT. Violent and sexual offences with penalties of more than seven years now attract a strike. On a second strike, an offender loses any chance of parole. On a third, the offender must also automatically serve the maximum possible penalty for the crime. Judges are allowed no leniency.

Kim Workman, former head of the Prison Service and a long-time justice campaigner with Rethinking Crime and Punishment, and now the newly formed Robson Hanan Trust, says three strikes is exactly the kind of regressive "blunt instrument" that guarantees more people rotting pointlessly in prison and giving New Zealand a bad reputation.

A FEELING exists that we're at a crossroads, he says. "There's no evidence for the effectiveness of increased sentences as a deterrent to crime. So it becomes an issue of punishment, of retribution, pure and simple."

With the financial as well as social costs of get-tough policies becoming plain, he believes even National is ready to pull back from the populism. "I think there's a groundswell of people saying that, with three strikes, really we've had enough. We've got to do better and start looking at what actually works."

ACT MP David Garrett, an Auckland barrister, former legal adviser to the Sensible Sentencing Trust and principal promoter of the three strikes policy, takes a deep breath. Sorry to sound bristly on this subject, he says, but there is just so much wrong with what his opponents are saying that he barely knows where to begin.

New Zealand the second worst for incarcerations? For a start, he says, we are way, way behind the US, with 748 per 100,000, compared to our 199.

There are also plenty of other nations ahead of us in the queue, he says. And it is true. In global terms, New Zealand actually ranks 61st – tucked in between the likes of Namibia, Libya and Mexico. "This claim we're No2 is repeated ad nauseam as a fact, but it doesn't make it any more of a fact."

More importantly, he says: "The number per 100,000 is a meaningless statistic unless you also consider the rate of crime in a society. And where did you get the idea that New Zealand is somehow a low-crime country?"

For violent offences especially, he says, New Zealand has seen soaring numbers since the 1970s. The homicide rate had quadrupled by the end of the 1990s, and risen fivefold in places such as South Auckland.

Although he is in favour of drug treatment programmes and other efforts at rehabilitation, Mr Garrett says the truth is that there are many criminals for whom such steps just don't work. These repeat offenders either need to be deterred, or simply kept out of circulation, behind bars, for the safety of the public.

The three strikes policy came from California, where hardline approaches are having a demonstrable impact, he says. The best argument for the policy is that, right now, New Zealand prisons house 81 killers who have three previous serious convictions. "Well, that's 81 victims who might have been alive today if we had had a three strikes law in place at the time they were killed."

He also maintains it's wrong to think New Zealand has become more punitive. "Fifty years ago, people went to jail for debt. And when people got a fine, it was `or in default, seven days in prison'."

As to changing course simply because prison is becoming too expensive: "If the figures tell us three strikes is going to require 140 extra prison beds over 10 years, well if that potentially saves 140 lives, then that to me is a pretty good cost-benefit analysis."

WHAT are the chances of a law and order rethink? Champions of reform say it is hard to shake the feeling that if you are having to spend $90,000 a year on an individual, it cannot be spent in some better way.

Ms Dalziel says a reason for optimism was a ministerial conference last year, Drivers of Crime, which looked at the root causes of New Zealand's high levels of offending, and evidence-backed approaches to reducing law-breaking.

The conference has already led to a government focus on alcohol abuse and better drug treatment. And she says that, despite the political sideshow of the three strikes rule, she believes many in Parliament are ready to put aside the vote-chasing to forge an enduring cross-party strategy to reduce the prison population – the sort of turnaround seen in other small countries such as Finland.

Others, however, feel we are already too far down the road to becoming a mini-America. Canterbury University criminologist Greg Newbold, once jailed for drug dealing, says the opportunity to change may have been missed. His honest summary is that New Zealand does have an out-of-line crime problem, particularly when it comes to burglaries and violence, he says. The burglaries can be put down to explanations such as poor security: "We live in bungalows rather than apartments."

But the story on violence is that it is largely about domestic violence – and domestic violence within our Maori and Polynesian communities. "The Maori and Polynesian offending rates skew New Zealand's figures upwards." Take the ethnic factor out of the statistics, Dr Newbold says, and New Zealand's crime rates and hence prison population would look quite European.

The figures were reported at the Drivers of Crime conference, he says. A 40 per cent increase in the arrests of Maori for violent offences between 1997 and 2006. Maori accounting for 13 per cent of the population but 43 per cent of arrests. Maori making up 51 per cent of those in prison, Pacific Islanders 11 per cent, Pakeha 35 per cent.

Obviously poverty, alcohol and urbanisation all contribute to the imbalance, Dr Newbold says. But we also have to face up to a culture of domestic abuse.

"The problems in New Zealand are quite specific. There is a cycle of violence that has to be broken. We know that exposure to domestic violence as a child is the primary predictor of crime as an adult. Yet to address this, the benefit wouldn't be seen for a generation. We would have to start thinking in terms of 25-year goals rather than the three-year goals of politicians."

A focus on prevention and rehabilitation rather than punishment and deterrence could make a real difference if New Zealand's crime problem does boil down to what is happening in our homes, he says. However, the legacy of get-tough policies is that we are now spending all our money just to keep pace with the exploding prison population.

That is why there is the double-bunking and cells built from shipping containers; that is why there are not even enough staff to allow prisoners the time out of their cells to attend counselling or work training. "We are trapped in this spiral," he says. The more we lock up, the less we can afford the measures that might reduce the need to lock people up. "New Zealand has been following along on the heels of the United States, about 10 years behind. So you can see right where we're going."

BACK in Christchurch District Court, the afternoon sentencing session rolls on, each case a sad tale of individual circumstance, each case demanding a proper penalty be paid.

A tall pudgy Maori with substance abuse problems, charged with several counts of assaulting a female. A diminutive woman who hooked up with a dairy farmer "old enough to be her father" and was caught in a $10,000 cannabis growing operation – wrapping tinnies to pay the farmhands.

Out of sight, out of mind, below stairs, a broad-shouldered youth in a dingy white T-shirt will be waiting on the arrival of the prison van, the latest tick in an ever upward statistic that is more than a little troubling. The Press

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