There was an understandable public outcry and the government moved to tighten up the relevant Act so a much larger proportion of remanded defendants are now kept in custody. This accounts for a large proportion, but not all, of the increase in prisoner numbers.
Another factor is the relatively new Australian strategy of deporting NZ-born prisoners on completion of their sentences.
There are tales of Kiwis who have spent years in Australia having their visas cancelled "on character grounds" for associating with suspected gang members.
No one knows how many of these deportees, many of whom haven't the slightest connection with New Zealand except the chance location of their birth, will become offenders in New Zealand but a senior Corrections official told me the best guess was that a further 300 to 400 prisoners could be added to our total.
This equates to another medium-sized jail and an annual cost to us all of $30-40 million.
This burgeoning jail population amounts to cruel financial pressure on the Corrections Department, which has been on a fixed budget for years. Simply put, each extra prisoner means less money for such proven strategies as drug and alcohol rehabilitation, skills training, literacy tuition and post-release mentoring.
Get all of these right and we'll heavily reduce the sky-high rate of reoffending which drives New Zealand's shamefully high rate of incarceration.
Judith Collins, now returning as Minister of Corrections, faces a huge and expensive problem but I, for one, have some faith she can make a real difference.
It is easy to write off "Crusher" Collins, as one editorial did, as a "penal populist" interested in little except "getting tough". It is also unfair and untrue.
If you have visited Auckland Women's Jail as I have, you'll see newish, tidy, self-contained mother-and-child units where offender mums can keep their kids for much longer than the nine months that was allowed before Judith Collins came along.
Officials at that jail will tell you this innovation has dramatically changed the jail's atmosphere for the better.
I attended the first opening of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit some years ago at Auckland Jail (Paremoremo). This was to be the first of many and begins to address the awful fact that a high proportion of crimes are committed when the offender is drunk or addicted to some drug or other.
There are now many such units. These started on Collins' watch, too, as did the successful drug and alcohol courts in operation in Waitakere and Auckland.
A couple of years ago, Bill English described prisons as a "moral and fiscal failure". Later in the same speech he said: "It would be good if we could have ... less young people coming into the ... pipeline where they start with a minor offence and end up with a 10-year sentence."
Where and how this pipeline starts is well known, and I've used this quote from British author Neil Gaiman before: "The [private] prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? They found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10- and 11-year-olds couldn't read."
There are nearly 500 people in jail right now for repeatedly driving without a licence.
As the Howard League has demonstrated in Hawke's Bay, the great majority of these offenders, with personal attention and some literacy instruction, can get licences and stay out of jail.
Let's hope Minister Collins is as creative this time around as she was before.
- Mike Williams is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president.
- Due to a production error the column which appeared under Mike Williams' name in our Saturday edition was, in fact, from another columnist. We regret the error.
- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
