Opinion: Prison reform a question of time

Hawke's Bay Today Senior Reporter Doug Laing. Photo / File

Yesterday's announcement shelving the Government's Labour Party campaign-fuelled plans to scrap the three-strikes jailing regime was a pleasant bit of rationale, given the wider prison reform scoping proposed for the next few months.

Whatever one's views on imprisonment — whether a punishment, sense of redress for victims or a public safety valve — there was no need to scrap three-strikes just yet.

Much like some sentences, perhaps, it's a waste of important time, amid workload with which the new Government has been faced since its installation almost eight months ago.

Other things need doing first, and what has been called a Labour Party election promise can wait, but no one should be made to feel guilty about remanding the matter till a later date.

Similarly a waste of time has been the National Party's claiming of success for three-strikes which it legislated in 2010, meeting its own full sentence for repeat serious offending promise from the campaign which returned it to power two years earlier.

This was its response to a 1999 referendum, supported by 92 per cent and asking: "Should there be a reform of the justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?"

That wording should never have got past, or even before, the parliamentary process, for whatever part the public really wanted was never clear.

It's a fair bet, however, it had more to do with victim needs than over-populating prisons, which seems to cost us all a bit more than it would to pursue the preventive goal of equitable levels of housing and employment for all.

Thus, prison reform is itself just part of the debate of social justice or what ever else it might be called, depending on the rationale.