A better way than more prison beds

whether agricultural gases should be brought into the scheme.

If her office follows the template used for her two reports into sea level rise, the first will focus on the science and a second would delve more deeply into policy responses – and Wright left that option open, though it would come after she quits next June.

But she does send some signals and some important messages, within the bounds of her independent remit.

The first is that delay is no longer an option. ‘‘The transition must begin. If we ignore the biological gases from agriculture, other sectors of the economy – and the taxpayer – will become increasingly squeezed.’’

The second is that there is no technological or scientific ‘‘silver bullet’’. Yes, there are promising developments, such as wider use of additives fertiliser to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, as well as breeding and feeding choices. But many effects are at the margins and some are just blue sky. A vaccine against the methaneproducing microbes in animals’ stomachs would be a stellar option, though she questions whether it will ever exist.

She doesn’t say it, though she could, that despite all the funding the Government has earmarked for research into reducing emissions we should stop relying on a breakthrough – and farmers needed to react now.

And while ministers have welcomed her report, they show no sign of the sense of urgency in Wright’s words.

Her first best options are forestry and farm management; which food we grow and how we grow it. She sees room for up to a million hectares of regenerating forest on marginal land, but a change in the rules around what can be used as a carbon credit (forestry rules will be renegotiated in the wake of the Paris agreement) would helpfully allow the inclusion of smaller stands of trees and riparian planting that would give farmers a benefit and an ‘‘economic signal’’.

The third message is one that not so subtly harks back to the shock of the Rogernomics years, when cockies were forced to go cold-turkey on subsidies.

As she puts it: ‘‘Making a smooth transition to producing lower-emission food is very important. Continuing delay just makes an abrupt transition more likely.’’

There are also threats on the horizon – including from synthetic milk and meat production – that will drive land use change.

Those who are looking in the report for an analysis of the targets for greenhouse gas reductions, how the ETS works, or the likely impact of climate change on agriculture, will be disappointed.

But it does provide the background to the question at the heart of the ETS and how we deal with agricultural gases: ‘‘What, if anything, should we do about the methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture?’’ The answer in short? ‘‘The transition must begin. If we ignore the biological gases from agriculture, other sectors of the economy – and the taxpayer – will become increasingly squeezed.’’

So more trees. Land-use change and diversity. Starting now.

This week the Government announced plans to spend a billion dollars on more prison beds. It says the spending’s needed to cope with forecast rises in the prison muster – as if increases were a force of nature, like a storm or earthquake. As Finance Minister Bill English put it: ‘‘This is something that has to be done. We have to provide the capacity. We’d certainly prefer to be in a position where this wasn’t happening …’’

But there is nothing inevitable about building more prisons. We have already opened five in a decade and doubled the number of beds, and the system is filled to overflowing.

It’s time to start making different choices. Our history of youth justice is a reminder we have changed paths before: in less than a decade between 1988 and 1996, we cut the number of children in state institutions from 2000 to fewer than 100.

This remarkable reduction in youth detention was made possible by the Children, Young Persons and their Families Act in 1989. The law introduced a series of innovative measures to keep young people out of institutions, among them a unique New Zealand invention based on restorative justice principles: the family group conference.

Rather than sending a young person to court, you can now put the victim and offender in a room together with their whanau. They talk it out and the offender hears firsthand the harm they caused. The conference is mediated by a trained facilitator, who works with all parties to develop a mutually agreed upon plan. When a plan is agreed and completed, the case never goes to court.

Conferences are no magic bullet. The evidence suggests some reduction in reoffending, but many victims choose not to participate, and of those who do, only about half say they are satisfied with the result. The process does not address larger issues of poverty and inequality at the heart of criminal offending.

However, in one area success is clear: as part of a broad commitment to stop locking up young people, conferences provide an important diversion pathway, channelling youth away from custody and freeing tax dollars for more productive solutions. They embody the local ingenuity needed to develop new ways of dealing with crime.

The same issues that drove the closure of youth institutions exist in our adult prisons. They lock up Maori far more than other New Zealanders. Violence and abuse are rife. They are expensive breeding grounds for criminality. Yet just as we decided to dramatically reduce the number of young people in custody, we began a programme of prison expansion unparalleled in New Zealand history. In doing so, we mimicked the American model. Our politicians passed ‘three strikes’ laws that have been ruinous in the US, named with a baseball metaphor that doesn’t even make sense here.

American prison policy should be a warning of what to avoid, not a model to mimic. The country keeps 2.2 million people behind bars, one in every 100 adults, but remains easily the most violent developed nation on Earth. A New York Times editorial summarised the catastrophic impact: ‘‘The research is in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough.’’

Instead of continuing down this path, New Zealand can start making different choices. When we committed to closing our youth institutions, we found home-grown solutions. We should learn from this history of local innovation.

Liam Martin lectures in criminology at Victoria University.