Increased Imprisonment Not Responsible for Drop in Crime Rate

"Recent claims by public commentators that the 6.7% reduction in the crime rate is due to the increased use of imprisonment, doesn't stack up against the evidence", says Kim Workman, Director of Rethinking Crime and Punishment. He was responding to a comment by the Hon Paul East, on yesterday's 'Q and A', that the lowering crime rate was due to an increase in imprisonment.

"The most authoritative research we have is from the USA. It concludes that in order to effect a 2 - 4% decrease in the crime rate, it would be necessary to increase the imprisonment rate by 10%. In the New Zealand context, it means that for every 900 extra people we imprisoned, the crime rate would decrease by between 2 - 4%. To get a 6.7% decrease, we would need to imprison somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 extra people. That would cost the taxpayer between $136.5m and $273m a year in operating costs, and require government to build between 2 - 4 very large prisons, at a cost of between $1 to $2 billion."

"Closer to home, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research calculated how much burglary might be prevented by the incarceration of offenders convicted of that crime. The basic findings were that to get a 10% reduction in burglary rates through imprisonment, they would need to increase the number of burglars imprisoned by 34% at a cost of A$26 million per year."

"Neither study took into account the potential effect of imprisonment as a factor that might itself result in an increase in criminal behaviour after the offender was released."

"One widely accepted finding is that any crime-reduction effects of imprisonment are subject to diminishing returns. Because high-rate serious offenders are more likely to have been arrested and imprisoned earlier on, the additional people sent to prison includes more and more lower level offenders , who can more effectively be dealt with in the community."

"Media commentators have a duty to provide reliable information to the public, rather than rely on folk lore."

ENDS

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