Dr Sinclair said New Zealand is chasing the United States as the most locked-up country on the planet. There, 724 of every 100,000 people is in jail.
At 217 per 100,000, Dr Sinclair said our prisons are overcrowded and bursting while, at the other end of the jail scale, the Nordic countries are hovering at the rate of 50 per 100,000 of their population incarcerated.
Where they are closingjails, we are wanting to build a billion-dollar 3000-bed mega-prison.
One of us has got it right and it isn't the land of the long line of locked-up prisoners.
If the Netherlands have fewer prisons and prisoners than we do, yet they have a population of 17 million, then perhaps we should be starting to listen and learn from them?
A recent survey from successful rehabilitation programs shows if an inmate can reconnect with their families before they are released there is a 40 per cent chance of them reoffending. Surely this must be the kicker to encourage Corrections and our community to start doing something different?
For me, there are some obvious incentives to keep our young men from going into or back to jail, the most obvious is the broken families they leave behind. According to children's trust Pillars, there are 20,000 New Zealand children affected by an incarcerated parent.
The other is we are locking up far too many of our men for crimes that are not endangering the lives of law-abiding New Zealanders. I am referring to the casual dope smokers and dope growers who are not frequent flyers through our front doors when it comes to crying out for help, be it homelessness or mental health challenges, including addiction.
If harm was the calculus with which we handed out prison sentences, from a frontline social services agency's point of view, why aren't we locking up those behind the glamourisation of a very powerful drug, alcohol, that has inflicted misery on generations of juice junkies?
When we demonise one drug of choice and glamourise another, what kind of message does that send to our kids?
So, what is the answer to our out-of-control prison population? For me and many who attended the homeless conference we held last Tuesday here in Tauranga, the problem and its solution are the same.
It's about reconnecting lost and disconnected whanau who have chosen a poor pathway to follow when they have had no family to turn to.
Communities have the answer if they are encouraged and resourced with the putea tagged for building more prisons. If we could all whangai or adopt just one prisoner who has been cleared as a non-violent non-high security criminal, we could reverse this race to be like the Incarcerated States of America in a New York minute.
"Never in 1000 years would I adopt a prisoner!" I can hear the keyboards crackling into overdrive writing letters of complaint to their local editor.
Why not?
Wouldn't anything be better than what is happening now when it costs about $100,000 per prisoner per year to keep them locked up? Not to mention what it costs to the broken families that 20,000 young kids belong to?
Criminalising more people will solve nothing and it is high time that groups calling for harsher penalties sat down with their local community kingpins and social service agencies and started working on this crisis together.
When our leaders are telling us we have failed - as has Minister of Corrections Andrew Little and retired leader of the National Party Bill English, who referred to prisons in New Zealand as "a moral and fiscal failure" - something needs to change.
When will we ever learn? Now is a good time to start because penal populism hasn't registered on the political radar until now.
The homeless and the prison crises are connected in cause and in solution on so many counts, starting with we are dealing with disconnected people who all want to belong to someone somewhere.
If we were to mirror the statistics of drug addiction, illiteracy, lack of life skills and no whanau support for the homeless and prisoners, I bet a billion dollars (the cost of building a new mega 3000-bed prison) we would find a startling comparison and a pathway for our young men to follow out of jail.
broblack@xtra.co.nz
