Huge cost of ‘not appearing soft’
No one has ever accused Corrections Minister Judith Collins of being ‘‘soft on crime’' but last week Collins faced, if anything, the opposite problem. Since our prisons are overflowing, Collins indicated, at least $1 billion of extra taxpayer funding will be poured into providing a further 1800 prison beds. Most of them will be located in a new 1500-bed facility at Waikeria Prison in the Waikato.
The imprisonment trends are certainly alarming. Our soaring prison population is predicted to reach 10,000 by 2017, and Corrections aim to recruit 600 new prison officers by this time next year. Five years ago, Finance Minister Bill English told a Families Commission gathering that prisons were ‘‘a moral and fiscal failure’' and expressed his hope that the 1000-bed prison at Wiri would be the last new prison built, because they’re ‘‘very, very expensive’’. Each prison bed entails some $250,000 in capital costs, plus $90,000 per prisoner in annual running expenses. Given how the country was tight for money, English concluded, ‘‘It would be good if we could have ... [fewer] young people coming into the pipeline where they start with a minor offence, and end up with a 10-year sentence’’.
Amen to that. Certainly, the international comparisons suggest that New Zealand is doing something wrong. As of June 2016, we were imprisoning 9495 of our fellow Kiwis at a startling rate of 203 for every 100,000 of the population. Compare that ratio with similarly developed countries such as France (103) Germany (78) Canada (114) and Australia (152). That’s bad enough, yet the striking comparison is with Ireland which has a similar sized population, but sends only 3688 people to prison, at a remarkably low rate of only 79 citizens per 100,000! By contrast, we’re jailing our citizens at nearly three times the rate of the Irish, and planning for more. Over 50 per cent of prison inmates are Maori, although people who identify as Maori comprise only 14.6 per cent of our overall population.
Typically, Collins was unapologetic. No, it wasn’t bad planning that Corrections was now re-advertising for hundreds of new staff, after slashing some 250 prison jobs last year. In her view, changes to the bail laws for family violence and drug offences explained why prisoner numbers were rising faster than expected. Nor did she feel shamefaced about the growing need for the double bunking of prisoners. Anyone who felt like complaining about prison conditions, she indicated, shouldn’t do the crime.
In sum, New Zealand is giving every sign of persisting – partly for political reasons – with punitive 1990s attitudes to crime. Elsewhere, crime rates tend to be dropping worldwide and the cost of imprisonment is causing even the United States – including Texas – to rethink its former ‘’lock’em up’' impulses. Unfortunately, our politicians still appear frozen by the fear of looking ‘‘soft on criminals’’. We’re all paying a rising price – quite literally – for that lack of courage, and vision.