Despite the best intentions of Just Speak, and despite having one of the worst incarceration statistics in the OECD (we are ranked 7th out of 155), prison reform is unlikely to see any real debate in NZ this election.
There are 3 main reasons Prison reform won’t happen.
1: Sensible Sentencing lynchmob meets media crime fetish
National and Labour simply gain too much political capital by playing the tuff on crime card with an electorate whipped into a lynch mob feeding frenzy. The NZ Media’s emotive sensationalist coverage of any crime replaces actual researched news meaning if it bleeds, it leads. If TVNZ thought they could get away with calling the ‘Beast of Blenheim’ the ‘Vampire Beast of Evil’, they would have. In such an environment the book burners of the Sensible Sentencing Trust have plenty of ammunition to turn anger into fear into hate and thus the place for rational debate is utterly ignored in the scramble to come up with new ways to punish rather than rehabilitate. If you consider the National Party glee at the spiteful decision to ban Prisoners from the ability vote, one can see that many in NZ won’t be happy until we bring back the death penalty and pelting wrong doers in the public square while locked in stocks.
Put simply we have a culture problem in NZ that impedes any real prison reform. We have too many angry rednecks led by a ratings driven media, not enough thinkers.
2: Money, money, money
One of the most disgusting things this Government have managed to sneak through is the privatisation of public prisons. As I have pointed out before…
The SERCO contract hasn’t been scrutinised by Parliament and we have little idea what we have signed ourselves up to for 25 years. SERCO told the London Stock Exchange in 2012 that they would be making $29m per year from their private prisons in NZ, over 25 years that’s $725m. That’s on top of the $900m to build this prison.
The argument that this will save us $170m over the life of the contract is optimistic beyond reason.
What’s truly awful however is that we will have to pay for 960 beds at Wiri even if the prison isn’t full. That means there will be a never ending thirst for 25 years to make sure that prison is full, because we have to pay for all the beds regardless. The incentives built into this deal favour SERCOs profit margin, they don’t favor the social responsibilities of the wider community.
When Wiri is open, NZ will have the highest proportion in the world of prisoners in private prisons. This has happened with zero consultation over the long term implications of connecting corporate profit to incarceration.
…what is most troubling in regards to the private prison out at Wiri is that ACC is a major shareholder in the deal, that means a Government Department is relying on a private prison for revenue. The only way they make money is more people locked up, seeing as we the taxpayer are paying for the beds at Wiri even if they are empty, the pressure to make sure those beds are full at all times is the only driver for the next 25 years.
3: The prison system is actually broken and no one wants to admit it
Currently we have the following problem. Sex offenders are going into prison and are too damaged to admit what they have done. This then means that they receive no counselling services at all. I contacted Corrections last week to confirm this, here was their response to my question on counselling services provided to prisoners if they don’t admit guilt…
It depends on the prisoner. If there is an acknowledgement of problems, or expression of interest in changing aspects of their lives, we will work to motivate prisoners to undertake programmes/treatment to help reduce re-offending.
Motivational interventions are provided by probation offices, case managers programme facilitators and psychologists, depending on the level of risk an offender presents and the level of intervention needed. Psychologists provide starter groups for the Special Treatment Unit programmes which are motivational in nature and undertake individual sessions with high risk offenders in an effort to motivate them. The medium risk offenders can attend the Short Motivational Programme run by programme facilitators. Probation officers and case managers carry out brief motivational interventions in an effort to encourage offenders to enter programmes or treatment.
Where prisoners are absolutely adamant that they did not commit the offences and don’t need to change anything in their lives it can be very difficult to motivate them and there is no point in them undertaking an intensive intervention or treatment programme.
…So what happens is this. Since the knee jerks of Labour and National, longer harder sentences are the norm and what we are getting now are prisoners charged with sex crimes who never admit their guilt and so receive no counselling whatsoever for the entire term of their sentence. What this produces are men who have served a full lag (6 years plus) with no socialisation skills and zero counselling. This helps explain why the Government have been hell bent on getting these very long prevention orders that go well beyond the sentence into place. The Government know they have these men being released from prison who are far more damaged than when they went in, and so their response is to tack on longer periods of observation and restrictions past the prison sentence.
Wouldn’t to be a far better idea to engage all sex criminals in counselling regardless of whether or not the prisoner can admit their guilt? Surely 10 years worth of therapy inside would produce a far better individual than 10 years of no counselling?
We have an electorate too angry to think beyond vengeance, a political class who have a vested financial interest in imprisonment and a system so broken they are releasing men more damaged than when they went in. That’s why prison reform won’t be on the electoral agenda this election.
Some good points here, a few other points:
We, here in New Zealand, are a penal populist society of incarceration – strangely much more so than other countries in the OECD.
– The media presents us with imminent perils and sensationalises fear, anxiety and tension
– The language of the victims rights group (e.g. the Sensible Sentencing Trust) have become the language of the victims themselves
– Definitions of crime and punishment have shifted from the academics, professionals and experts to the victims rights advocates
– The length and form of sentences was determined more through politics than law, ‘justified’ by the 1999 Citizens Initiated referendum
– Neoliberal ideology encourages us to understand the causes of crime in individual terms – bad individuals rather than unjust societies
– …but we shouldn’t be surprised by violence. Pratt and Clark (2005, p.310) state that “these [crime and punishment], at least, have seemingly obvious causes and solutions that are understandable to all, at a time when many other aspects of life have become unfamiliar and unsettling, and beyond the boundaries of common sense to resolve. In these respects, in New Zealand, it becomes possible to trace a growing sense of anxiety and insecurity during the first half of the 1990s which was related to the consequence of the economic and social changes of the 1980s but which crystallised around the seeming impunity of serious violent and sexual offenders.”
It’s a form of structural racism. Just over half of all prison inmates are Maori and 40% of Maori males over the age of 15 have been imprisoned or served a community sentence, stats which are similar to blacks in America.
White society reacts with fear and a throw-away-the-key mentality while at the same time Maori seem to the “usual suspects” when it comes to police action.
Maori are the most rapidly urbanised indigenous people on Earth, yet this urbanisation has largely failed, perhaps more profoundly than that of Moslem immigrants in Europe. NZ is in uncharted territory here, because Maori are the indigenous people of NZ and much Pakeha prosperity is based on the exclusion of Maori from their best former rural lands in places like Taranaki, the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, whence the drift to the towns and fuel for resentment alike.
In the days of a full employment welfare state and government support for non-land-based industries, the period 1945-1975 which was described as a golden age for Maori in spite of only limited cultural recognition, there was a chance that these injuries of history would heal.
But then we got mass unemployment, followed by mass imprisonment.
The third act of this particular play, which will probably involve some kind of mass radicalisation (quite possibly accompanied by counter-radicalisation of Pakeha in some kind of “laager” sense), is yet to be written and it is up to NZ society as to how it will play out, either constructively or not.
To borrow a line from Jefferson, this is the “firebell in the night” that should be keeping NZ awake.
Unfortunately as Bomber says, there’s no real debate about how NZ society has failed Maori in these big picture terms, only “lock ’em up and throw away the key” on the part of an ageing, relatively wealthy Pakeha population when confronted by a fast-growing ethnic group whose youth unemployment approaches 50%.
And so, ironically, the old, white, fearful “mainstream” New Zealand of yesteryear–the backward-looking demographic in charge of the country right now–is also squandering, marginalising and sacrificing the youth of today, the prime citizens of tomorrow, who unfortunately happen to be of a different colour.
It seems to me that at some point power must pass from old, white, fearful, rural-minded “Heartland” New Zealand to young, brown urban New Zealand and that when it does it will appear as a sort of revolution.
Unfortunately, by practicing mass imprisonment of Maori, the New Zealand that is on the way out is creating at least the risk of a nastier sort of revolution dominated by settling of scores and not a velvety sort dominated by democratic themes.
You bring up some good points here, and it does bring up a wider problem. Crime is strongly linked to economic inequality and it should not surprise that ethnic minorities are over-represented in such statistics as part of global pattern.
So what is behind this? I’ll bring in the idea of social exclusion: most of us have similar norms and expectations particularly around consumption. There’s a widely correct idea to consume yourself to stability (e.g. having a good house, car etc.) So people know what constitutes a ‘good life’ but cannot access it (worrying as each year passes, fewer and fewer of us can afford these things). In New Zealand, this social exclusion is racially marked (towards Maori and Pacific peoples).
What are the effects? Second rate goods seem to indicate second rate people, and so such marginalised people gain a diminished social status leading to poor social ties. The thing that protects us from violent crime is the social ties we have with one another. A sense of belonging, belief that our needs will be met, the idea that we can live peacefully with our neighbour underpin a healthy society. What happens when that diminishes, when we’re discriminated by class and ethnicity, when we’re affected by low chances of mobility? We are less confident that we can rely on our support systems. Say you lose your job, considering all of this, you are less likely to see yourself as part of the community. We inflict pain on the other. We feel rage because we resent social injustice. But more importantly, we feel shame. We mask this shame through violence and rage, and shame intensifies when people feel entrapped and isolated, especially in unequal societies. Violence is expressive, perhaps an attempt to restore one’s status as somebody who matters.
A criminal is a criminal, irrespective of their ethnicity. Almost all, if not all our ancestors got ripped off by barons, factory bosses, bankers, religions, governments. We can’t blame anyone alive now, nor can we reclaim the lost wealth. Get over it and become productive members of society as it stands now, instead of standing on the sideline with a huge shoulder chip, throwing mud into the mix.
That mentality utterly ignores hegemonic structure of power with society – it’s an almost infantile perspective on the world.
Personally I get tired of well-fed minorities claiming victimhood off the back of their less fortunate ancestors. It’s bullshit and makes me sick.
But it’s true that it is harder to get employed if you are Maori. This is because employers operate like insurance companies. They don’t know you and so make a statistical risk-based decision based on what they do know. So you turn up to an interview with a brown face and they say to themselves (privately)…”this guy is more likely to steel from me and be late or intimidate other staff, etc”…and sadly they are right. Chances are higher. Not prejudice – chance. And so it’s harder if you are brown to get in the door, but it can be done.
Peace.
… don’t get me started on this topic…. not enough words to describe the urk!
Fact correction my comment – Maori youth unemployment is officially 22% not approaching 50%. Would be higher however if not for massive Maori emigration (a point Hone H. has made). According to Simon Collins in the NZH, ‘The great ethnic job divide’, 17 March 2014, between the 2001 census and the 2013 census, the Maori population in the age group 25-35 dropped 9%. Not youth, but indicative nonetheless, and often competing for similar jobs.
This guy in my link thinks very clearly. The real function of prisons is to deter people. Not to rehabilitate them which doesn’t even work.
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/eco-prisons.html
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