Mark Burton: Our soaring prison numbers

Although recorded crime continues to drop to its lowest rate since 1982, the number of people in our prisons is higher than ever before, and continues to grow.

This necessitates fresh thinking on new and more effective ways offenders can repay their debt to society.

New Zealand's rate of imprisonment has always been high. As far back as 1954, the then Justice Department noted that, relative to our population, New Zealand had 50 per cent more people in prison than England.

International comparisons are fraught with difficulty. We can never be sure that we are comparing like with like. Such comparisons seldom tell us about other important drivers of a country's prison population, in particular, sentence length.

Nevertheless, the most recent world prison population list ranks New Zealand's rate of imprisonment as fifth-highest in the OECD. Other measures put us as high as second in the Western world.

The growth in our prison population has been particularly rapid over recent years. At the beginning of March, New Zealand's prison population peaked at 7610. In comparison, there were 6868 inmates in March last year and 4530 a decade ago in March 1996.

It is clear that high inmate numbers are not a short-term problem either. In March, the Justice Ministry's most recent prison population forecast suggested a figure of 8685 by June 2010, approximately a 23 per cent increase from June 2005.

The forecasts take into account trends in prosecutions, sentencing, remand time and imprisonment rates. Much more difficult to measure is the impact of factors that appear independent of legislative change.

This includes the unanticipated effect of increased sentence length across all offence categories rather than being confined to more serious offending, as was expected.

New Zealand's escalating rate of imprisonment is no longer sustainable, either financially or socially.

Attention has focused on the financial cost of building sufficient facilities though of equal concern is the social cost borne by families and communities.

Let me be clear, for serious repeat offenders and hardened criminals from whom the public must be protected, there are no other viable options to imprisonment.

For some other offenders, however, imprisonment is not the solution it is often perceived to be. The use of a range of sanctions, including non-custodial approaches, may be more productive, as well as being a smarter use of resources.

I don't believe any of us can take any pride in the high level of imprisonment.

The public debate that has taken place over recent months indicates what is, I believe, a willingness by the public, a number of politicians, advocacy groups and commentators to consider the use of alternative sanctions, reduce crime and punish those who commit it.

Justice Ministry officials are leading a multi-agency project looking specifically at initiatives that will help to reduce both criminal offending and the number of prison inmates.

The project, which is due to report to the Government in the next few months, will consider the feasibility of alternatives to imprisonment for some offences. It's clear that my ministerial colleagues and I will need to make some serious decisions to address the issues.

There is no doubt that we are moving into a new environment in which some of the old thinking about crime and the criminal justice system will need to be rethought. The openness to both recognise and debate the issues is a good start.

* Mark Burton is the Justice Minister. His article coincides with a conference on imprisonment run by the Prison Fellowship in Wellington starting today.