Crime rate drops – yet we are locking up more NZers?

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Less crime but more prisoners
Number of New Zealanders locked up continues to rise despite Government efforts to reduce reoffending

New Zealand’s prison population continues to grow despite record-low crime rates and an ambitious Government strategy to cut reoffending.

The number of prisoners has grown steadily over the past 15 years at a rate well above New Zealand’s population growth.

Figures obtained under the Official Information Act show the National-led Government has slowed that trend, but the rate of imprisonment remains stubborn.

We have a political culture generated by Labour and National who have played to the anger and fury generated by a myopic crime news media who use ‘Beast of Blenheim’ style hysteria to create an environment where hate has warped social policy.

The media’s low grade love affair with crime is ratings driven as well as being cost effective news fodder, their irresponsible coverage helps build a naked rage that is manipulated by the likes of the Sensible Sentencing Trust as well as ‘tough on crime’ crap politicians, this has left us with a septic legacy of bulging prisons while the crime rate drops.

But it gets worse than that. With the advent of Private Prisons, we now have Government agencies like ACC as core investors in the NZ private prison industry, that means their generation of revenue is partly focused on getting as many prisoners as possible into private prisons. We have handed over a billion for a new prison at Wiri for a contract worth decades in which the NZ taxpayer will pay for every bed, even if the prison is vacant. We have created an empire of suffering built upon incarceration.

The reality is that NZ is simply not a mature enough society to have an adult discussion on crime and punishment, the myopic media focus on crime projects a society out of control on the verge of a mad max apocalypse, nothing of course can be further from the truth, our crime rates have actually dropped. This fact doesn’t stop the Sensible Sentencing Lynch Mob manipulating victim grief to demand the usual ‘longer harder’ prison crap and both main political parties have been guilty of playing to redneck vengeance rather than enlightened social policy.

Allowing private prisons to create a profit motive for incarceration was one of the worst things this National Government has created alongside their ‘streamlined’ justice system that removes Jury trials, decimates legal aid and allows trial by video camera. As we see more and more people being locked up having large questions marks hanging over their guilt, it is apparent that National have built a conveyor belt of rough justice dealt out to those too poor to fight back.

A society should be judged on how it treats its worst members, by that standard NZ has failed miserably.

12 COMMENTS

  1. Crime rate drops – yet we are locking up more NZers?

    Well, it might represent societal anti-crime hysteria as you suggest – or, it might be that keeping recidivist offenders imprisoned for longer means fewer crimes are committed. Personally, I don’t care which it is, the lower crime rate is welcome.

    As to “the media’s low grade love affair with crime,” you may have noticed the news stories in which journos express surprise that an Aussie court “made an example” of Russell Packer by giving him a jail term for something so apparently trivial to journalists as an unprovoked beating that could easily have killed the victim – not exactly baying for blood, I would have said.

    • Nah, our journalists were just surprised that Russel Packer is rich and famous and still got put behind bars. Doesn’t happen in NZ

  2. “…..A society should be judged on how it treats its worst members…’

    A society should be judged on how it deters people from becoming it’s worst offenders!

    The death penalty and/or long prison sentances can be used as a deterance from the truly innocent being killed; the NEXT victims of nuinced sentancing! Deterance, rehabilition and penalty are just three of the nuinces. And what weight each should carry is further more again.

    Hanging someone by mistake, is far far less likely to happen than someone becoming the next murder victim. Far, far less too than the number of women who regret having an abortion!

    Infact, murderers don’t take dna samples to see if they should kill their victim. Which then of course means, that conviction for murder without dna positives does not then lead to a hanging but a natural life term for murderers.

    If you do not value life with a life – then you are undervalueing life itself.

    Ironically then, and maybe ignorantly, you may well be one of societies worst members Martyn!

    There is such a thing as the Sanctity of Life.

    • So we go back to a society of who you vote for will decided if your going to get the death penalty or a life sentence.

      My god do you know no history?

      http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/capital-punishment

      or

      http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/the-death-penalty

      a good start. I say start because it is a sad history in this country a very sad history indeed.

      Do you realise it makes little or no difference if you have the death penalty or not in relationship to deterrence to murder? And do you know, the last guy they hung – they put allegedly In front of his name – why you ask?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_James_Bolton

      Sanctity of life – what a creepy argument, it means nothing, it’s just slight of hand propaganda puffy. If you feel so much that life should be regarded on high – then do something positive – help get better wages – create benefits for single parents which mean there children get a fair go. Anything, but killing people – your contradictions are painful.

  3. I’m no expert but maybe there is a link between locking up violent and dangerous people and a low crime rate?

    • I’m no expert either Matthew, but I’ve seen no evidence of that theory when comparing countries. If your maybe was a reality, then USA would have low violence and the Nordic countries would be violent – but they clearly are not.
      However, economic inequality is a fairly good indicator of both violence and imprisonment

      • Many of those Nordic nations are closing down prisons, they rehabilitate their prisoners and help them back into society. The reason why there are such high imprisonment rates is pretty obvious, there are few jobs for ex-criminals and the government doesn’t offer them enough support to get them out of the reoffending cycle. National’s desperate three strikes policy is meant to hide that their prison system is failing, as they prefer to lock offenders away than bother to help them stop re-offending.

  4. Three out of four posters so far have provided evidence that we are not mature enough to have this debate. The guy who has fantasies about hunting revolutionaries in the Bolivian jungle and crushing their skulls really should get help. And learn to spell.
    The fact that Russell Packer gets so many column inches shows that the media does have a love affair with crime and violence.
    The rate of imprisonment is to do with the rate at which people are imprisoned now, when the rates of offending have already fallen.
    As always, any discussion of penal policy turns into a circle jerk by the terminally righteous. Meanwhile our government shovels dollars into the open pockets of the private prison firms, that are themselves being prosecuted in their countries of origin. Our media publish SERCO press releases. Sigh.

  5. …we are not mature enough to have this debate.

    I guess not, given the childish approach to statistics shown in the thread.

    The rate of imprisonment is to do with the rate at which people are imprisoned now, when the rates of offending have already fallen.

    This, for example. There isn’t necessarily a linear relationship between rates of offending and rates of imprisonment, because not all offences are imprisonable ones. It would be entirely possible to have increasing offending and a declining imprisonment rate, if the increasing offending was in minor offences. It is also possible to have declining offending and a static imprisonment rate, if the decline is in minor offending. In short, it’s not as simple as the post’s author makes out, and one thing we can be fairly confident about is that media reporting has little to do with it.

    There’s further complication. If you look at the stats, eg on this Stats NZ page, you’ll notice there’s a suspiciously sharp decline in the rates of offending and of charges laid from 2009 onwards. Does that point to a sudden improvement in NZ society, a sudden change of heart by large numbers of criminals, a sudden improvement in drug abuse rehabilitation? Or does it point to a sudden change of policy regarding the gathering of potentially embarrassing statistics? Call me a cynic, but my money would be on a change in the way offending is counted and deliberate decisions about whether to charge people for offences or not. Then, consider which offences are more likely to be able to be dismissed without being counted or charged – murders? Serious assaults? Armed holdups? Kind of more likely that they stop counting and charging minor offences, I would have thought. So, what does that do to the proportion of offences that result in prison sentences? There’s a lot of slippery customers involved in these figures, and not all of them work for Serco by any means.

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