Politics
Getting tough on crime can have unintended consequences.
When politicians decide to get tough on opinion-poll slumps, and tough on the causes of opinion-poll slumps, they rummage through the law-and-order bin.
Give Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges a little credit for originality, though. The gangs are only the secondary target in his new policy. First, he’s going after the real menaces to law and order, the woolly-woofter, snivelling liberals who want to hug druggies and ask violent crims about their childhood teddy bears.
Bridges’ extraordinary Twitter outburst about “a middle-class journalist sneering predictably” at the policy suggests he, as a former Crown prosecutor, is personally invested in it, and it’s not just the product of National’s perpetual focus-group hothousing and the party’s recent poll deflation.
Still, after years of Sir Bill English’s methodical, grass-roots, data-driven social-investment focus, the policy is quite a departure. As with the recent “discussion document” on welfare policy, it seems designed to push buttons and rouse the rump rather than continue English’s quest for joined-up, multiagency preventive approaches to social dislocation, poverty and crime.
To say this policy doesn’t build on English’s work is like saying President Donald Trump has not built on his predecessors’ multilateralist foundations. More jails and longer terms – well, that’s one way to achieve bulk social housing.
Bridges is right to observe that recycling repeat offenders through jail isn’t getting us anywhere.
But National’s new solution is to unapologetically grow the jail population, not least by storming gang forts and throwing the book at their inhabitants.
What to do with the dependants of gangs left behind? No specific policy there. What to do with the new prison inmates? Force them to improve themselves, or make them work. Make-work is very expensive, but let’s suppose National is sincere and will spend what it takes to provide work and training.
Trouble is, even in injecting a bit of “love” into the “tough”, by refusing to let anyone out on parole until they’ve achieved NCEA level 2, the policy founders on the problem that a lot of inmates can’t read well, if at all. The policy doesn’t say by how much, if at all, prison literacy and education programmes will be boosted. Given there’s already a severe school-teacher shortage, recruitment for prison teaching could be tough.
REMEDY OR WRITE-OFF?
A great many prisoners also have severe mental-health issues, including hardwired personality disorders for which neither science nor psychiatric medicine has yet found a cure. NCEA level 2 is not going to keep the public safe from such sufferers, or them safe from themselves. Counselling can help, but the Government is struggling, despite greatly boosted funding, to get qualified staff to fill jobs in general-public mental-health services. If National is serious about rehab, it would have to pay big bucks to lure more qualified psychiatric professionals from overseas to staff jails, as this is not a job for “life coaches” or enthusiastic volunteers. Inmates are people with deep-seated, complex problems. Not the least of
If National is serious about rehab, it would have to pay big bucks to lure more psychiatric professionals from overseas.
which is methamphetamine. If you’re not dangerous already, meth will take care of that. It makes people unstable, impulsive and often violent. Worse, unlike other addictive drugs, pharmacopoeia experts tell us the craving for it never truly goes away. Now it’s so cheap and plentiful, the most elusive dragon to chase is public safety.
Viewed charitably, National’s policy appears to be to incarcerate more people and for longer, then educate and counsel the living daylights out of them. There are no costings, but if undertaken comprehensively, this approach would be horribly pricey. The prison population, close to 10,000 now, would spike sharply under National’s mooted tougher sentences. We already spend $1 million per bed just building a jail. We could, if we take National at its word,
look forward to a proud future as the world’s biggest spender on prisoner rehabilitation. But Bridges might not be so keen on pushback from the very rump he’s trying to secure for “lavishing free education and healthcare on crims” that the law-abiding have to pay towards.
Less charitably, it seems more likely the policy would work by locking up the problem of crime and effectively ruling a line under the future of those criminals because they are too expensive and difficult to rehabilitate. Hopefully, National would also continue targeted social investment to prevent the same criminalising dysfunction taking root among those prisoners’ offspring. No politician would dare frame it that way, of course – well, not in New Zealand. But certain other countries have no issues with, or electoral consequences from, a policy of indefinite detention that writes off thousands of people. One is just three hours away by plane.
SETTING RAPTORS LOOSE
This policy U-turn has a distinct Australian twang to it. Bridges has been wowed by the unexpected electoral success of Australia’s conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and keeps close watch on our neighbour’s policies and political strategy.
Clearly, he was unable to resist the cartoonish title of New South Wales’ gang unit, Strike Force Raptor, which micro-targets gang members, right down to pitiless parking-ticket enforcement.
How ironic that a direct consequence of Raptor’s crackdown is that Australia’s hardcore Comancheros gang now has a beachhead here, courtesy of the Aussies’ deportation of New Zealand-born offenders. It’s their current detente-cum-war-dance with New Zealand gangs over the meth trade that underpins Bridges’ call for gang extermination.
However, lawyer, former National Party minister and police inspector Chester Borrows, who chairs the Government’s soon-to-report justice advisory review, says such policies have failed to eradicate gangs anywhere in the world, as has much else. They just go further underground.
Bridges shrewdly assesses the public’s repugnance when advocates such as Borrows urge that we treat the likes of gang members as victims as well as crims. But most chose this path because they were victims, usually of dreadful upbringings, from which the state failed to save them.
Some Nats are privately embarrassed by the new policy, but with a distinctly socially conservative new slate of candidates inbound, they might be stuck with it.
All we know for sure is that the gangs will take full advantage of their transtasman meth supply-chain merger as the most divisive election law-and-order debate in decades chunters on in the background.
Australia’s hardcore Comancheros gang have a beachhead here courtesy of the deportation of New Zealand-born offenders.