More jails are not the answer
Do you want the good news or the bad news? When it comes to crime in New Zealand, the Government can offer you a choice. Corrections Minister Judith Collins recently claimed that levels of crime are down but – and this may seem paradoxical – the prison population is up. According to Collins, this necessitates a massive $1 billion plan to create another 1800 beds in prisons.
Cynics might wish that houses could be built with such speed and commitment. The majority of those 1800 beds will be within a planned facility on the existing site of Waikeria Prison in Waikato, to be run by Corrections but built and maintained by a publicprivate partnership. The remainder will be in a new block at Mt Eden, in Auckland, and in the existing Ngawha Prison, in Northland, where double-bunking will be expanded.
Collins has a personal interest in maintaining a tough-on-crime image and this expansion of prisoner numbers was promoted as another act in the longrunning war against methamphetamine and violent crime, while also somehow being a surprise to the Government. But a lock-them-up mentality seems to contradict the growing wisdom around methamphetamine that advises more attention on drug education and treatment. Experts say we must come to see drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal issue. War-like thinking has not solved anything.
Collins also warns that no meth dealers will get a free pass on her watch. Reports of her announcement even implied a level of empire building. Along with the $1b Corrections spends, the department is to hire another 700 staff, including 100 ‘‘very experienced’’ staff from overseas. Orange is still the new black for Collins.
Yet our imprisonment rates are already more than a third higher than Australia’s and Britain’s, with an alarmingly high number of reoffenders. Figures show that 69 per cent of people starting new sentences have been sentenced previously, according to ACT leader David Seymour, who calls the ‘‘prison population blowout largely a reoffending blowout’’. Collins has acknowledged the Government has fallen a long way short of plans to reduce reoffending by 25 per cent by 2017.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Bill English famously called our prisons a ‘‘moral and fiscal failure’’. That line has come back to haunt the Government. English has pushed for social investment strategies in areas like health, housing and welfare to improve the conditions that are known to produce crime. Advocacy groups such as the Howard League argue persuasively that reoffending could decline if education and training were more accessible to prisoners, nearly 65 per cent of whom have literacy levels below NCEA level 1.
By contrast with Corrections’ big spend, only a fraction of the $15 million recently allocated by Prime Minister John Key to tackle the methamphetamine problem will go towards treatment and education programmes in schools and prisons. Despite some gestures by this Government towards more sophisticated social investment approaches, the numbers tell a different story about populist, simplistic answers to complex crime and punishment questions.
Experts say we must come to see drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal issue.