Urgent plea for quick fix of jail crisis

Justice advocate Roger Brooking has launched a campaign and petition to cut the nearly 11,000 prison muster to 7000 over six years.

He says the Government needs to act urgently with quick-fix solutions to address the mounting crisis of capacity in Kiwi jails.

In February, the country’s prison population hit an all-time high of 10,695 with the Corrections Department reporting just 300 beds left in the nations bulging jailhouses – in 1950, there were 1043 prisoners; by 1987, they numbered a little over 3000.

Brooking’s own quick fixes include an immediate repeal of the Bail Amendment Act 2013 to cut the number of prisoners on remand, eliminating very short sentences of six months or less, and imposing suspended sentences on those serving between six and 12 months.

Late last month justice minister Andrew Little said he was getting advice from officials on bail laws, which were beefed up by the previous National Government.

Brooking has also taken aim at the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST) for creating a moral panic around the 2011 murder of Christie Marceau and using the raw emotions of her grieving parents to manipulate the former National Government to toughen bail laws, which has put more people on remand behind bars.

‘‘Gullible politicians got influenced by the emotional presentation of the victims – and logic, evidence and reason got thrown out the window,’’ Brooking said.

New Plymouth lawyer Paul Keegan broadly backed Brooking’s strategy and said while Corrections was putting on a brave face over the problem, many in the legal profession were concerned about ‘‘a system that is groaning under the strain of incarceration’’.

Stop-gap fixes like double-bunking and pop-up prisons risked creating the conditions for jailhouse riots, which had both a human and financial cost, Keegan said.

SST founder Garth McVicar said it was instructive that Brooking’s campaign focused on reducing the prison population and not criminal offending.

‘‘It is as though they think New Zealand magically locks up people for no reason. Every prisoner has committed a serious offence, or has a serious record of committing offences,’’ McVicar said.

While it was true the remand prison population was much higher now than it was prior to the Bail Amendment Act changes in 2013 the trust did not resile from the changes it helped lobby for as the previous act had been ‘‘excessively lenient,’’ McVicar said.

National’s justice spokeswoman, Amy Adams, said she rejected the misconception ‘‘in some quarters’’ there were a whole lot of people in prison who didn’t need to be there for public safety reasons.

Adams said the consistent advice she had received from Corrections when she was justice minister was that the bulk of those short-term, low-risk prisoners had already been addressed.

"[The] system is groaning under the strain of incarceration.’’ Defence lawyer Paul Keegan