Judith Collins diverts attention from the Salvation Army’s ‘Moving Targets’ report

17 February 2016

“In an effort to divert attention away from the Salvation Army’s ‘Moving Targets’ report, Police and Corrections Minister Judith Collins in this morning’s interview with Mike Hoskings, presented the nation with yet another “moving target’”, says Kim Workman, JustSpeak strategic advisor.

“First, she played down the fact that New Zealand’s prison population is 35% higher than the UK and 28% higher than Australia, or that while more than half of all countries and territories (55%) have imprisonment rates below 150 per 100,000, New Zealand imprisons at the rate of 194 per 100,000.” The rate of imprisonment for Māori is seven times that of non-Māori and more comparable to the US rates. The mass imprisonment of Māori in this country is a significant issue and one that the Minister of Corrections should also be concerned about.

“But it didn’t stop there. She claimed that the increase in the prison population was due to Māori gangs; less than two months after her own officials advised in an official briefing that they were puzzled by the increase and made no mention of gangs. Her view that 40% of prisoners were gang members, is an absolute fiction, as Jarrod Gilbert demonstrated last year, when Anne Tolley claimed around 28% of class A and B drug offences were committed by gang members. The actual number is something like 4%. According to Judith Collins, Māori gangs were largely responsible for an increase in serious violent crime, even though violent crime has been reducing for several years. Non-Māori gangs apparently were less of an issue.

The biggest fabrication however, was her claim that crime has reduced because all the serious offenders are in prison. If there is one thing criminologists and criminal justice professionals know, it is that there is almost no connection between the crime rate and the imprisonment rate anywhere in the world. Even her own officials informed her in their latest briefing that ‘the crime rate is a weak driver of prison muster.’

Minister Collins dismissed as irrelevant the government’s reducing reoffending goal of 25%, and Corrections attempts to reduce reoffending, by blithely telling Mike Hoskings that the reoffending rate was in the vicinity of 80%. The overall 24 month reoffending rate for former prisoners is actually around 55%. It is lower for offenders who do not go to prison - even when comparing offenders with similar patterns of offending. The Minister dismissed reoffending as inevitable, which belies a lot of evidence that reducing the prison population and supporting offenders to stay connected to their communities through family, employment and housing reduces offending.

The solution is not in building more prisons or policies of control and suppression – nor does it help to unnecessarily generate fear amongst New Zealanders. There are other jurisdictions that are getting significant reductions in offending by reducing the prison population.

What the government needs to accept is that prison is a cause of crime. If the government chose to do so, it could reduce the level of imprisonment by a substantial percentage (say 15%) within five years; and do so in such a way that would reduce criminal offending. In recent years, criminologists and economists have been working to identify how specific sentencing policies affect crime. Recent research at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, examined the benefits and costs of policies that would lower the length of stay by three months for lower, moderate, and high risk-to-reoffend inmates, and would result in a decrease of the state prison population. For low-risk offenders, the benefits of the fiscal savings outweigh the increased costs of new crimes from the policy. Releasing low risk prisoners three months early would result in a subsequent reduction in crime, and a significant return on investment.

ends

© Scoop Media