KEY POINTS:
You can hear the shock in his voice. "I'm lost for words," says Professor David Fraser, former British prison officer, author, and doctor of philosophy.
"I thought New Zealand was a relatively law-abiding country."
I've been telling Fraser about two recent New Zealand cases: that of a sex offender paroled to live near schools and a rest home, who, despite an appeal from the Corrections Department to have him recalled, went on to indecently assault a 95-year-old woman; and the Rotorua woman who had supplied P and grown $61,000 worth of cannabis in her garage, and was sentenced to home detention after the judge referred to her glowing references and "good character."
I can hear him sigh over the phone. "Most of us viewed New Zealand as a haven of good sense," continues Fraser.
"The power of this left-wing thinking takes my breath away."
Professor Fraser is the author of A Land Fit For Criminals: an insider's view of crime, punishment and justice in the UK.
For 34 years, starting in the 1950s, he worked in British prisons, the Probation Service and Criminal Intelligence Service.
Finally, galvanised by watching paroled criminals return to prison with depressing regularity, while the streets, buses and trains grew steadily more dangerous, he decided to write about it.It is a story we have heard before: treating criminals kindly encourages them. Heavy retaliation knocks them back.
Fraser points out that just after the war Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was so excited by the Britain's law-abiding culture, he copied its justice system. Forty years later Singapore is still following that same system while Britain (followed closely by New Zealand) has pursued a more liberal approach to crime.
The crime statistics of both countries took different routes too. Singapore has achieved a relatively steady crime rate of 2000 per 100,000 people: the British rate grew from 2000 (1950s) to more than 10,000 (1996) crimes per 100,000.
Why the discrepancy?
According to Fraser, "the Singapore Government made the pursuit of criminal lives unbearably hard, full of risk and totally without reward". Britain, on the other hand, created what he calls "a country fit for criminals" by implementing sentencing policies driven by liberal ideology and cost-saving.
The new regime, says Fraser, was based on the theory that criminals are created by inequality (poor housing and poverty) rather than bad behaviour. They are in the grip of something like a mental disease rather than calculating crooks. Authorities must give them a chance to go straight. And, of course, building and maintaining prisons, is expensive.
The end result, he writes, is that British authorities are no longer primarily concerned with the safety of the public. "It has failed in its first duty - to protect its people."
"What I discovered over those 34 years is that placing persistent reoffenders back in the community as an alternative to prison, does not work, either as a means of reform or protecting the community." he says.
"Yet decades of anti-prison ideology were thrust at the courts. Sometimes I found it difficult to go into work. I couldn't bear the lies and deceit pulled on the British public ... Then as late as 2006 the Home Secretary announced that his next five-year plan would be based on more community supervision of offenders. This is tantamount to holding the public in contempt."
Over 395 pages, Fraser sets out to prove how the British penal system has been maintained by misinformation, skewed statistics and false propaganda. It is a message the 66 year old is to deliver as a guest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
"Public statements by senior judges and politicians, saying 'prison does not work' and that 'community sentences are effective in reducing crime' are contradicted by hard evidence," he says.
"Statistics are skewed to give the result they want. For example, saying New Zealand has the second-highest imprisonment rate in the world and England the worst, is not true. The correct way to calculate the imprisonment rate is to measure it against the crime rate. And that puts New Zealand sixth or seventh from the top."
"Yes," he concedes, "Your country and ours have high crime rates. Put aside why - what we're interested in is how many of our criminals are in prison."
Fraser wants more of them in jail. He resents the fact that women cannot walk safely on local streets at night, store owners are under constant threat and poor people are preyed upon by their neighbours.
His mission: to preach the unfashionable message that prison is a good idea. So what if prison does not reform people: they are locked up and not harming the rest of society.
But what about the theory that sending people, especially young people, to prison catapults them into hardened crime? Again that incredulous "hurrumph" over the phone: "The idea that prison creates more crime is hogwash. After years working in the prison service I can tell you what young prisoners tell me," he says. "Before coming into prison they had long, long, lists of offences. They were already criminalised with very little to learn."
Indeed, as he says, the hard evidence shows that longer prison sentences coincide with reduced reconviction rates. Sixty per cent of those sentenced to a year in prison reoffend compared with only 27 per cent reoffending rates for those sentenced to 10 years or more.
And no, prisons are not the expensive option according to Fraser.
"The cost of imprisoning 80,000 offenders is £3 billion ($7.8 billion) a year. The cost of crime [to the community] is at least £60 billion pounds."
In Britain, it is even more difficult to get jailed and stay there: Just 0.3 per cent of offenders go to prison. British law dictates that all prisoners are paroled after 50 per cent of their sentence.
In New Zealand prisoners sentenced pre-2003 must be released after serving two thirds of their sentences. Those sentenced after 2003 may be kept in, possibly until the end of their sentence. Criminals also receive concurrent sentencing (if they are judged guilty and sentenced on two crimes, their jail time is often served at the same time).
Fraser sent his manuscript to 60 publishers before it was finally accepted by Book Guild Publishing in Surrey.
If the Singapore story does not convince, Fraser quotes America which went down the same liberal path as Britain. By the late 1960s America was declared "the crime centre of the world," he reminds us.
"But then there was a public revolution and they started doing the opposite - and did it with a will. They arrested everyone who broke the law, shut down petty criminals, imprisoned those who needed to be imprisoned, lengthened prison sentences. In 1980 they had 308,000 people in prison, now there are two million."
In the 1990s in New York then-mayor Rudy Giuliani set out to fight organised crime, break the tangle of corruption in government and prosecute jail drug dealers and white collar criminals. Fraser says the number of murders fell from more than 4000 a year to around 400, "a breathtaking decline". Homicide rates throughout the United States have also declined to levels last seen in 1960s.
Now, says Fraser, he senses the same surge of anger against the system that America experienced, in England. "Although the British people have been quiet and acquiescent for years, that's changing. " They may be quiet by nature, but once they turn, they react with great violence."
TALKING IT OVER
Hear David Fraser with Christine Rankin, Mayor Andrew Williams and Garth McVicar
Where: Rangitoto College auditorium, 564 East Coast Rd, North Shore City
When: Monday June 16 at 7.30pm.
Public meeting and debate
Where: Auckland Boys Grammar, Centennial Theatre, Mountain Rd, Epsom
When: Thursday June 26, 7.30pm.
