We all know the “tough on crime” approach is only a stop gap measure at best, and that a justice model based on incarceration doesn’t work. Our prisons are already overcrowded and under-staffed. More often than not, they function as training centres for young offenders, and as sites for gang recruitment. Prisons also lack the necessary resources to treat mental health disorders, drug dependency, and the consequences of inter-generational abuse that are often the drivers of crime.

Longer prison sentences tear families apart, and reduce the employment options available to former prisoners on release. Ultimately, “tough on crime” policies produce more desperate individuals who, on their release back into society, will have few options open to them but to revert to predatory and/or gang-related behaviours, in order to survive.

We only have to look at the US and United Kingdom to see the evidence that should be deterring us from repeating their mistakes. Regardless, the coalition government is planning on using the fast track process to double the capacity of Auckland Prison:

Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell told the Herald it was the department being “proactive” amid forecasts for growth in the prison population. He said that was in part due to the Government’s “public safety” focus with reforms to sentencing.“I anticipate there will be in the shorter term, an increase in people coming into the Corrections system...”

Waikeria prison is also to be super-sized, with its capacity being set to increase from the current 455 to 1,865 beds. Around the world, punitive sentencing regimes are known not to reduce the incidence of violent crime. Reason being, many of these offences are crimes of impulse, where actions are not rationally weighed beforehand against the likely consequences. While the government knows all this, it continues to stoke the fears that crime is rampant within the community, and the belief that longer terms of imprisonment are the only viable solution.

Calming the fear

The community’s genuinely-held fears should be being allayed – not inflamed – by our political leaders. On global comparisons, New Zealand is rated as among the ten safest countries in the world. We are the fourth safest place in the world on this list. Yet for years and over the course of several governments, we have locked people up at an alarming rate.

For example: at 181 citizens in prison per 100,000 of the population we have one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the developed world, and that’s before the coalition government’s harsh new sentencing regime comes into full force. In Ireland, a country that’s almost the same size as New Zealand, the imprisonment rate is only 91 per 100,000. Unfortunately, there are no votes to be won with messages of reassurance and by prioritising the funding of rehabilitation. In the end, at least the politicians will be OK. Those ministerial salaries will enable our current crew of Cabinet ministers to retire within gated communities, safe from the consequences of their policies.

As social worker Bex Silver pointed out in a well argued article last year on Newsroom, crime is not simply an individual choice. The incidence of crime tends to be reflective of race and income – as well as prior family histories of abuse, untreated mental illness and drug dependency:

The most marginalised people in our society are also the ones who are disproportionately perpetrating crime. Incarcerated people are more likely to come from a background of poverty, homelessness and untreated mental health problems.

Last year, a sample of 63 children involved in ram raids revealed that 95 percent of them came from homes where at least one act of violence had been inflicted on a family member by another. If this doesn’t persuade us to start taking a family and community-centred approach to mitigating crime, I don’t know what will.

Punishing an individual and placing them back into the same environment won’t work. When a flower isn’t doing well, we don’t kill it, we change the soil and climate conditions.

Such reasoning is falling on deaf ears in the Beehive. Despite its rhetoric, the government has little interest in crime prevention. It is choosing to be solely reliant on punitive sentencing as a form of deterrence, even though that is known not to reduce the level of violent crime short term, while being more than likely to make such patterns worse in the long term.

According to PM Christopher Luxon, the reintroduction of a tougher Three Strikes regime is a response to public sentiment. Perhaps if he and his colleagues hadn’t chosen to inflame public anxiety with their “soft on crime” allegations on the campaign trail last year, public sentiment would be more supportive of a rational, less socially damaging response to the causes of crime.

Footnote One : Reportedly, the rates of violent crime began to increase in 20922, and that trend is continuing. Typically though, Luxon is taking credit for all of the positive changes on the political landscape – such as the fall in inflation, which began to decline last year – while blaming his predecessor for all of the country’s problems: 

In a statement, Luxon blamed the previous Government for these crime stats.“It is also further proof that the previous soft-on-crime approach has emboldened offenders and created a crime wave that will take a much tougher approach to stop,” he said.

There is no sense from Luxon that the increase in violent crime rates may be reflecting New Zealand’s accelerating rates of poverty, despair and deprivation.

Footnote Two: The new version of the Three Strikes policy will be tougher, and will also be retrospective:

Several thousands more offenders are likely to be captured under Three Strikes 2.0, following substantive changes by Cabinet to toughen up the new regime.

Those changes....include halving the sentencing threshold for a first strike, and making it retrospective, which would capture several thousands of the 15,000-odd offenders with strikes to their name under Three Strikes 1.0.

On crime, we keep pursuing the same failed policies, expecting that the outcome will somehow be different this time.

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