Lock ‘em up, string ‘em up
So, our prison population has reached 7,000 for the first time, and New Zealand now has the dubious honour of locking up a greater proportion of its people than any other developed country bar the United States. Well, way to go guys.
So, what have the major parties got to say about this? Well, Paul Swain tells the Dominion Post matter-of-factly that this was an inevitable result of the Government’s law and order policy. Tony Ryall, a man who has anti-intellectualism down pat when it comes to law and order, is promising a National government would lock up even more people!
All of which is profoundly disturbing, especially when you consider that more than half of those in jail are serving sentences for non-violent crimes. For almost all these inmates, it’d be much more effective (in terms of trying to combat reoffending) and a million times more cost-effective to utilise non-custodial sentencing. It’s well known that the surest way of turning an offender into a reoffender is to lock ‘em up, so the obsession with prisons is really rather difficult to fathom.
Jordan Carter over at Just Left is furious about this. He writes:
Why we have a public pissing contest between the major parties about who can be tougher on crime is beyond me…
It’s a failure which comes from a bidding war for middle and working class voters, who constantly get told that tougher sentencing will solve crime when it will not. Like it or not, that seems to be where politics is at. My party [Labour] is responsible for taking part in the bidding war, but we have never led it - and the vile Tony Ryall has a lot to answer for on this front.
How can we generate a more rational debate on criminal justice policy that actually deals with the problems, and does not lead to the second-highest imprisonment rates in the Western world?
Well, I’m not sure that I agree with Jordan that Labour is less culpable than National here. What’s worse: a populist Opposition proposing bone-headed, simplistic, and counterproductive law and order policies for purely populist reasons, or a Government so devoid of principles and leadership in this area that it caves into that Opposition rhetoric? I’m sorry, but I can’t see why one is despicable and the other is kind of, you know, understandable and minimally acceptable.
But, in answer to Jordan’s question: how do we generate a more rational debate on justice? Well, what you do, Jordan, is convince your Caucus that on law and order a Labour-NZF or Labour-UF coalition would be a disaster, and that a Labour-Green administration would be a million times better. While an infusion of Green ideas would be very welcome in this area, think of the disasters “lock ‘em up, string ‘em up politicians such as Marc Alexander or Winston Peters could wreak with the justice portfolios in their populist hands…
April 29th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Well, this is good so far as it goes, but the real challenge is to persuade the punters that a) lock-em-up policies won’t work, and b) that non-custodial sentences will work.
Simply telling people that they are stupid for not understanding this isn’t the way to go. It’d be the kind of liberal arrogance that has sunk the US Democrats.
One has to engage with, and persuade, voters of it. Probably only Labour could do this, and it could only do so in a non-election period. It could also only do this working with the Greens. It’s a live issue on our side of the fence.
April 29th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
Law and order - it must be election time.
People like it when politicians say “We’re gonna get tough on crime”, which sounds great, but the reality of policy is that it comes out as “We’re being tough on criminals”, which is something rather different.
Solving the crime problem requires solving social problems, and that requires the sort of committment that governments aren’t willing to step up to.
So we’ll stick with sticking poeple into community prisions, which provide exactly the sort of support a first time criminal requires and which more or less guarantees he’ll be back for more.
April 30th, 2005 at 1:12 am
From the outside looking in, the policies you espouse appear to ignore personal and parental responsibility factors. There seems to be a belief amongst the left that crime is caused by one’s external social conditions especially poverty (which is extremely relative of course). If that’s true then why don’t ALL people in poverty commit crimes and why do people NOT in poverty commit crimes? Crime (as with one’s position in life) is a result of attitudes. In the case of criminals, unhealthy and unhelpful attitudes such as “the world owes me a living,” “I care about myself but not about others,” “they’re much richer than me and they can afford it” abound.
Now solving that is not simple, but pretending that lousy attitudes are never a factor and everyone’s a mere victim of external circumstance, will never achieve anything.
I’m not a particular fan of simple imprisonment. For example, I think the US system of long harsh sentences issued for small crimes is also extremely stupid.
The answer I think lies in a hard-headed realistic approach that recognises both punishment, and rehabilitation, as part of every sentence, but where punishment is a recognised part and not just a dirty word to be minimised. Give prisoners harsh spartan conditions, but don’t ever allow brutality. No internal violence from guards or inmates, should be permitted, ever.
Many people who do crime today have had neither discipline nor love in their lives. What do we do about their parents, who have proven unfit?
Such people have serious wounds in their hearts, but they won’t be cured by touchy-feely family-group-conference-like punishments that have no teeth and achieve nothing. Nor will they be cured by harsh, cold discipline with no compassion. There needs to be a combination, with hard wise heads that have the freedom to decide, making the decisions. And that’s not what happens today.
April 30th, 2005 at 10:59 am
You’re going to hate this I think, but why do we require people to have a licence and a microchip for a dog, yet allow crims. to breed crims totally unregulated?