National’s appallingly costed Prison Empire and what it will really do

By
Martyn Bradbury
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43
817

‘Ineffective, expensive, inequitable’ – expert on Nats’ crime policy

An expert has slammed National’s proposed law and order reforms, saying the party’s policy is “retrograde”.

At a party conference over the weekend, National said wanted to limit judge discretion in sentencing, curb the use of cultural reports, and offer rehabilitation to remand prisoners that are awaiting sentencing.

AUT law dean and parole board member Khylee Quince told Breakfast: “There was not a lot of inspiring policy proposed in this suite of reforms, nothing new here really. I’d sum it up by saying ‘ineffective, expensive and inequitable’.”

It comes after data released in March showed retail crime had increased by 39% over the year prior.

But National’s announcement “is fear-mongering”, Quince said.

“They’ve cherry-picked certain categories of crime there, [and] the media chooses to highlight certain types of crime at any given time.

The National Party Conference was held over the weekend where Chris Luxon launched a whole range of kneejerk law and order policies that were ill thought out and stupid.

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I wrote that within a week National would have walked back all this nonsense once journalists started asking actual questions of the policy to strip Judges of discretion, impose harsher sentences and somehow force prisoners on remand to complete rehabilitation programs.

Hilariously Chris was walking things back within 24 hours!

Note how empty the National Party Conference actually was to remind yourself National doesn’t have wide enough support to fill the ground floor..

…National claim the soft-on-crime-cuddle-a-crim Labour Party are fecklessly letting out 4000 prisoners while the crime rate soars. What they don’t understand is Labour lowered the prison population using National Party Prison policy that allowed for non violent offenders to apply for home detention while in prison. The only difference between National’s use of their policy and Labour’s is that Labour provided prisoners with help filling out the forms because most prisoners are illiterate.

If National don’t understand the current prison policy, how can they provide solutions?

National claimed they would get prisoners on remand to complete rehabilitation programs, but you can’t use any rehabilitation programs unless you accept your guilt. Why would prisoners on remand waiting trial admit guilt?

Do National actually know what they are talking about?

We had this surreal situation over the weekend where Journalists bombarded National for costing of this mass incarceration policy and they had no numbers. Asked what the cost of a NZer in prison per annum was, Paul Goldsmith and Chris Luxon said “$100,000,” when the actual cost is $193 000″.

How can a Party push extreme uncosted policy like this and pretend to be a Government in waiting?

My fear is that ACT and National can’t actually tell the difference between the Mongrel Mob, Headhunters, Hells Angels, Black Power or Comancheros and that’s an enormous problem because the gangs who flooded Opotiki to mourn the murder of their President and who freaked middle NZ out so much last week, are not the same as the sophisticated Cartel linked gangs who are making enormous profit from NZs meth trade.

How will banning gang patches prevent the 501 syndicates from importing south american cartel meth?

We ask Judges to be independent and use mercy in their decision making, National wants to rob Judges of that discretion and force them to impose heavy sentences even if there are mitigating circumstances.

Do National want justice or a lynch mob?

Those derided ‘cultural reports’ give Judges insight into the criminal to see ion there is anything redeemable here rather than the simply brutality off imprisonment!

WE. WANT. JUDGES. TO. HAVE. THIS. INSIGHT!!!!!!!

National don’t actually understand the Prison Empire they built when last in power, their solutions to remove discretion from Judges, impose harsher sentences while pretending rehabilitation programs (that can never and will never work in remand) are the silver bullets.

This isn’t a law and order debate, this is a right wing wet dream fantasy that has little basis in reality. None of the ‘solutions’ National are offering will do the things they say they are attempting to solve!

If anything, it will cause an explosion in the prison population which will ultimately lead to a full blown prison riot as the underfunded, over crowded, violent jail population (minus any of the joke rehabilitation National are promising) will event horizon into a black hole of misery and suffering!!!

So why is our crime rate soaring?

Well, we have to acknowledge the unprecedented importation of 501s bringing a culture of criminal violence far in excess of what was generated by our domestic gangs. Labour can’t be blamed for that!

We also have to acknowledge that dairy crime was far higher in 2016 when National were last in power than they are now!

What is generating the majority of the current crime wave however is the same thing that is generating crime waves throughout the post-covid Western World.

The same is happening in Australia,  UK, Canada and America.

Post covid societal and economic stresses causing crime waves at the same time there is 12.1% food inflation and a cost of living crisis while surviving the ongoing economic, cultural and social impacts of climate crisis storms and geopolitical shockwaves is as predictable as National having to walk something back 24 hours after Luxon says it!

Of course crime is exploding everywhere because the covid sacrifice was felt unevenly across our unequal society, pretending building more uncosted fucking prisons is a solution to all of that is sophistry at its most intellectually bankrupt.

 

 

 

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43 COMMENTS

  1. The thing that Nat/ACT really don’t seem to understand is, that gangs are a creation of prison. More gang members walk out of prison than walk in. Their prison policy will just creat a large number of converts to gang life. But hey! It’s not about actually doing something about crime, it’s about the appearance of doing something about it.

  2. You lefties should never lecture anyone on appalling costings ok! No govt has been worse at handling taxpayer money than the Chappinda Govt. 3W is the latest cost blowout at 1 billion for consultants coming right up.

    • And you vacant reactionary bigots should really have listened to the teachers in primary school when they tried to teach you to add more than single figure sums… Apart from being laughably vacant of any relevance whatsoever, your little brain fart reminds us just how utterly vacant far too many NZers have become… For that alone, it was useful..

    • Oh year KH, we hear this sort of drivle over and over again, no one ever does a proper analysis of any of it so how would we ever know. In the analysis you have to include exceptional events, and by god there have been a few of them.

      I do not vote for the Labour party and never ever will nor for that other mob who like big beat ups every 3 years before election time.

    • KH and you think this policy will save money. You righties are so hypocritical. You actually think that lord god Luxon is your own personal savior. Luxon and his 2 stooges didn’t have a clue about the cost of a major policy and you righties think this is actually ok. Is it ok to have costings after the election, Bishop think its ok. This mob is taking you all for a ride and you lot are so anti everything government that you are all too thick to see it.

  3. I can safely says after nearly 6 years of Labours Plan A, it’s a collosal dismissal failure. Ask the guys down in Christchurch who apprehended a thief this week only to be told by the woke neutered police, to let him go. Perhaps the police were only ceding to the inevitable, nothing would happen even if they did arrest him! Very sad situation though!

    • So Xray, how could the Police have responded any differently under National who provided far fewer officers?

    • Labour doesn’t think debt has to be repaid.
      As for costings just look at the shambles Dunedin Hospital has become yet Andrew Little is still on the payroll.In private enterprise he would have been fired years ago.
      Financial ills in the education sector a previous ministerial responsibility of the Prime Minister the Chipster.

      • Remind us all once again how much Key’s unmandated failed attempt to change the flag cost the taxpayer …Oh!!… that’s right….$27,000,000 dollars ,(that’s $27 million dollars) for what…an ego driven piece of nothingness that wouldn’t even make the grade as a souvenir ‘t’ towel in a one of those hideous $2 dollar shops.
        What an absolute waste of time and energy for all the hard working taxpayers out there who can’t avoid tax by hiding their money in trust funds all over the world.
        Then there was the millions that McCully squandered by sending a whole lot of sheep to one of the hottest places on the planet only to find out they couldn’t handle the heat thus ending their lives…ah duh!!!…who would have thought!!
        Then there’s Bill English whose legacy is spending 100’s of millions of dollars of tax payer’s money on a massive, (soon to be), white elephant irrigation scheme zigzagging it’s way across the South Island. Not to mention their pennywise pound foolish mentality of running down all infrastructure to a point where repair costs strip replacement costs. So stupid. They don’t even have a basic understanding of economics.
        Let’s face it !! National are fucking hopeless with money and decade after decade the stats prove it. This current crop is no different. Leopard…spots…

        • You cannot be serious Grant?
          Labour have spilt literally billions.
          Sir John Key’s $27 million not by comparison a drop in the ocean.

  5. For a bunch of Clintonite hacks, the Labour Party doesn’t seem to be very good at the neo-liberal ‘triangulation’ they’re always going on about.

    We all know the corporate political donors will never let New Labour change economic policy. But they seem to have forgotten exactly how their heroes, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, made their names: being so tough on crime that nobody could possibly attack them on that issue.

    Most people reading this newsletter would understand that you won’t be able to build prisons fast enough if the economy is collapsing, and wages are cratering. But even a socialist government would still need to smash the cartels, the mafia and the motorcycle gangs — and unless you’re sending every one of them to the gallows, that inevitably means more prison cells and more policemen.

  6. At least National plan to do something about crime whereas Labour as usual are sitting on their hands.

    • No Bob, National have shown with their lack of detail that their policy is about getting votes, nothing more. The fact that their ‘lock them up’ policy would actually make the problem worse is lost on their die-hard supporters.

    • Bullshit Bob – they are all talk and locking people up for longer frankly has never ever been the answer.

      • Look Bob’s an idiot, we all know that. He’s also a troll because none of his posts involve critical thinking and are juvenile in nature.

  8. Why don’t we just call them Enlightenment & Education Camps??

    Centers where people can enter for a prescribed length of time to be enlightened and unburdened of their day to day woes and pressures.

    The British and the Germans and the Poles were experts with these types of specialised camps. They too we’re designed to target specific groups of people.
    History will tell you that they weren’t very effective and nor did they improve the lives of the people inside or outside of these camps for very long. 100 or so years and yet we’re pretty much back to where we started.
    Fascism, Authoritarianism with an added kicker, Neoliberalism.

    We’re as fucked now as we were then.

  9. hello to the nz prison industrial complex..maybe we can exceed the US in the percentage of colored men in the pokie…yah another nz first

    but the nats donors will be quids in, so every cloud…..

  10. $193K per annum suggests a law abiding single unemployed on jobseeker should be receiving this amount as well, along with a guaranteed roof over their heads, three meals a day and access to health, education and employment opportunities. Otherwise this is gross inequality. Maybe get humanitarian Tony Ellis to fight for the unemployed not in prison.

  11. The report just out shows Labour is not doing a good job of running the prisons so obviously they need a change of direction.
    National offer looks good to me .

  12. The empty hall at the conference – what an eye opener!

    It doesnt take a genius to see National is effed but that empty room says it all. Used to be full of small business owners hobnobbing and grifting but know its like a Sunday service in an Anglican Church. Or as my old Mum would say – 3 hairs and a nit.

  13. The government that spent 50 million dollars on NOT building light rail and a similar amount on NOT building a skypath cannot use cost as a reason not to enforce the rule of law.

    In fact, it must be done, almost regardless of the cost because this country is spiraling out of control.

  14. Labour, their policy on crime and incarseration, the farm fence well indulged with fences the National cronnies saying oxymoronic, our crime policy its cost effective, it shall look after those incarcerated, rehabilitate those and our youth boot camps leg braclets, shall educate them. Aye, outside farm fence justice policy these people always endevour to do, is our caring social policies of education health and caring.

  15. Uffendale, this uni arrogant farm fence riddicule fat you, look at me, why this arrogance, of sexual abuse be allowed in parliaments farm back benches.

  16. Lol.
    Today TikTok banned a heap of gang associated accounts for being criminal organizations from NZ TikTok despite the fact woke police HQ and woke Labour don’t actually recognize gangs as criminal organizations.
    Retards.
    Do we even wonder why crime is getting so bad and gang numbers exploding?
    We have absolute idiots in the beehive, vote them out at the election, possibly charge them for sponsoring crime with their 2.8 million mob subsidy.
    Just how bad does it have to get?

    • I take it you think that cops should be just able to just gun down gang members in cold blood then. Maybe put on white hood and hang them from a lamppost? Perhaps just arrest random Maori and put them in some kind of camp?

Comments are closed.