Locking up logic in $1b monument to our failure
Help! There are only 300 prison beds left to accommodate our booming prison population and our useless Labour Government is sitting on its hands wondering whether to build a new $1 billion prison.
That’s the present situation, if the National Party is to be believed. Sounding like someone who’d just spent nine years inside and still maintained his innocence, National’s Corrections spokesman, Simon O’Connor, reckons the current crisis is the Government’s fault.
The facts are that despite our crime levels staying pretty much in line with other countries over the last 30 years, our prison population has skyrocketed thanks to various ‘get tough’ policies enacted by previous governments. I’m all for getting tough if it works, but it doesn’t.
If our prison population had plummeted, people would, like me, say, ‘‘I didn’t like National’s hardline approach but the numbers speak for themselves’’. But the numbers show that the policies of the last nine years, and before, have been an abject failure.
So where should we look for advice? Not the US, where incarceration rates are even worse than here. US prisons have become a big industry.
The policy of the previous government seemed to be that in order to get tough on law and order you needed to build more prisons to accommodate all the new criminals. And build them it did. Bright spark Judith Collins had the brilliant idea of private prisons. If the private sector ran the prisons more cheaply than the state, which insisted on these tiresome regulations, then housing the increased number of prisoners would cost the taxpayer less.
But by the time Kelvin Davis exposed the terrible state of privately run Mt Eden, poor old ‘Serco’ Sam Lotu-Iiga found himself as Corrections Minister. He reminded me of a teenage Black Caps opening batsman facing a barrage of bouncers from a fourpronged Aussie pace attack.
Now Davis, thanks to his predecessors, is in the unenviable position of either committing to building a $1b prison he doesn’t want or risking an accommodation crisis and alienating police, prison and justice staff – the very people he needs to help him reduce the prison population.
So, given that we don’t want violent criminals roaming the streets, how do we reduce prison
We should be locking our prisoners in classrooms with inspiring teachers and throwing away the key.
numbers? A good start would be to get rid of people who aren’t violent.
Thankfully, the Government wants to treat drug addiction as a health rather than criminal problem. Governments that do this, such as Portugal’s, report a decrease in drug crime. I suspect the legalisation of cannabis would greatly reduce gang-related crime.
Half of prisoners are Ma¯ ori, so let’s admit that the New Zealand penal system has failed dismally and that we need to look at new initiatives. I understand that many Pa¯ keha¯ may feel uncomfortable with autonomous Ma¯ ori-run penal facilities, but how would they feel if such facilities were found to slash Ma¯ ori offending?
We know that many prisoners lack education. A teacher, be they of reading, carving, music, art, plumbing or carpentry, has more than earned back their annual salary if they stop just one prisoner from offending for one year. We should be locking our prisoners in the classrooms of whatever they want to learn, with inspiring teachers, and throwing away the key.
Over the last 30 years, our prison population has encountered lots of vote-winning sticks and few vote-losing carrots. That’s why they’ve reoffended. You don’t have to be a sickly, liberal Newtown basil grower to see the benefits of rehabilitation. Every prisoner who is rehabilitated is one less person who might burgle your house or attack your family.
Davis has had a shaky start in Parliament this term but his record on Corrections has been exemplary. I hope he listens to the top academics who have recently urged him not to build the new prison and ignores the calls from those clamouring for yet another expensive, hi-tech monument to failure.