Justice Minister Andrew Little– “What we are doing is not working ..it is not making us safe”

Justice Minister Andrew Little told Q+A’S Corin Dann that our reoffending rate is largely unchanged after 20 years.

The Justice Minister told Corin Dann, “here’s the significance of a 60 per cent reoffending rate in our prison population, that’s 60 per cent of those in prison will reoffend within two years of being released.

“We’ve had thirty years of the auction of more penalties, more crime, more people in prison but it‘s not working, it’s not making us safe.”

“It is not right that we have had this 30 per cent increase in our prison population in just the last five years. That’s not right. That tells you there is something wrong. It’s not right that we have doubled those remanded in custody just in the last five years. ”

When asked about Maori representing more than 50 per cent of the prison population and whether the system is racist, Minister Little said, ‘I don’t think you can rule out that that is a real possibility that that is a cause of a massive over representation of Maori in our prison system.”

Mr Little said, ‘just the humanity of it means we have to do something different to what we are doing at the moment.”

Mr Little was speaking ahead of the Criminal Justice Summit which starts tomorrow.

Please find the full interview here.

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