Prison should not be school for criminals

Root causes of offending must be addressed.

There is a useful power embedded deep in the Corrections Act that not too many people know about. It’s called section 161 and it basically says that members of Parliament have the right to enter a prison at any time and ‘‘examine it and the condition of prisoners’’. It exists for a very important reason – we are meant to be part of the regime that ensures our prisons are properly run.

I remember wishing, on about my fourth prison visit, that MPs, prisoners, their families and Corrections staff weren’t the only ones who saw the inside of these places – because maybe then we would have a much-needed conversation about them. There will be a whole range of views on the primary purpose of prisons but we can probably all agree that they are about ensuring communities are safe, that a debt is paid to society, and that the person who committed a crime won’t do it again. Our strike rate at achieving those goals at the moment is pretty low, which surely tells us that we shouldn’t be looking at prisons to fix problems that would be better addressed much, much earlier.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some people who should never be released back into society. I am not talking about them. I am talking about the ones who maybe start off as kids with a bit of petty crime, but they escalate, eventually landing themselves in prison. If the threat of a prison sentence worked, surely they would stop the first time they were caught. But they don’t. In fact, there is a good reason why our prisons are commonly referred to as training grounds for gangs.

Surely, then, the most effective thing we could be doing, is taking a good hard look at what has caused an individual’s offending in the first place. But none of that is going to happen as long as we have a corrections minister who doesn’t accept the research and evidence around the causes of crime. Last week, at a Police Association conference, a officer from the north acknowledged what he saw as the link between poverty and crime.

The Minister refuted that link. She is wrong, and I ignoring facts and evidence does not make her a defender of those in poverty, it just gives her an excuse to ignore the role that Government has to play in addressing poverty in the first place.

As Dr Kim Workman from the Institute of Criminology recently stated, it would of course be ‘‘wrong to suggest that all people who live with considerable financial constraint will offend’’ but ‘‘research and practice shows strong links between crime and poverty. The Dunedin life-course study of 3000 New Zealanders (and other research) shows that people from low socio-economic backgrounds are three times more likely to commit crime than those from wealthy families. Official crime rates are always more elevated in poorer communities, on both sides of the coin: victimisation rates are higher among the poor, and the poor are more likely to be arrested and convicted for offences.’’

To deny that, is to deny fact. You would think part of the answer would be investment in those communities – strengthening families, increasing educational and employment opportunities, improving access to stopping violence and drug and alcohol programmes, and having a plan to reduce poverty. But that was not the minister’s response. Not only has she denied the role that the environment we grow up in has on our life path, she has just announced another $1 billion of spending into building more prison beds.

The day I visited a prison and saw a 17-year-old on remand staring at a wall, and was told by a guard that he would do that all day because ‘‘that one can’t read’’, was the day I decided we had to do things differently. The only question is, how much longer will we be putting money into the wrong end of the system?