Dialogue: Prevention of crime far better than jail 'cure'

Corrections Minister MATT ROBSON says new ideas about turning people away from a life of crime and reducing reoffending offer the best prospect for public safety.


I'm trying to build three regional prisons around New Zealand. There is, of course, always strong local opposition wherever I announce the site for one. No one wants a prison near where they live.

Unfortunately, a large number of New Zealanders by world standards will have a regional prison in their area because New Zealand has the world's second-highest rate of imprisonment.

When offenders are locked up, it is often because they have done something to hurt someone else. So if we want to make the public safe, far more attention has to go into preventing offending before it happens.

We have preventive detention for offenders who are dangerous and who cannot be reformed, and the Government is introducing a Sentencing and Parole Bill which will ensure that dangerous offenders are not automatically eligible for early release. They are the terrible few responsible for grisly crimes, and they can be distinguished from most in our prisons - the many who drive while disqualified, steal or take drugs.

Twenty-nine per cent of inmates are in prison for property offences, 22 per cent for traffic offences, and 20 per cent for other offences, including drugs. I'm not saying these offenders should not be in prison. But what we do with them while they are inside will make the difference between a crime rate that goes up or down.

I recently released a report called "About Time." It found that locking up offenders for longer, or letting them out earlier, doesn't make much difference to the crime rate. For example, Finland cut the number of crimes punishable by imprisonment. The prison population fell and the crime rate did not change.

Some states of the United States went the other way and put offenders away for much longer terms. The prison population grew enormously and the crime rate did not change.

The most effective way to keep the public safe is to intervene before people start out on a life of crime and to stop them reoffending.

Young people who are likely to become tomorrow's hard-core offenders can now be identified with increasing certainty as newborns, as school entrants, as young offenders and as early adult offenders.

The highest-risk individuals are born to mothers who are young, have little education, are from a disadvantaged family where there was little care or attention, are dependent on alcohol or drugs, are socially isolated and have a number of male partners.

This background does not condemn a child to adult offending, nor excuse it. Plenty of New Zealanders have overcome adversity in the early years and gone on to rich and happy lives.

But each of the main risk factors increases the probability of anti-social behaviour by between four and 10 times. If all of these factors appear together, the risk increases many hundreds of times.

So the first recommendation in "About Time" is to reduce the number of highest-risk births.

It recommends working with young women and men who fit the profile and who are in the social welfare and justice systems. Teaching them about contraception and avoiding exploitation, and teaching them about the advantages of delaying child-bearing until they are settled and mature and suitable support is available.

The cost for each intervention is about $500. The cost of offending is so great, and the intervention so effective, that for every dollar spent, there is a return to New Zealand of $50.

We need to back that up with more support for high-risk new mothers, in what I call the James Whakaruru situation. A child born into that tragic situation who had survived would have been at very high risk of teenage and adult offending.

Programmes such as Family Start cost about $3000 a time, and ultimately save the taxpayer $25 in future offending for every dollar spent.

These figures take into account that there will be some interventions where none would have been needed and, of course, many people who will go on to offend will still slip through the net.

The earlier you intervene, the more effective the result, but the harder it is to work out where the intervention is needed. With returns as high as 50-to-one, it's worth the investment.

And then we can move to children as they enter school. Teachers are able to identify many of the school entrants they believe will end up as adult offenders, such as the hypothetical 5-year-old with the angelic face that Celia Lashlie spoke about recently.

An intervention for a 5-year-old who is aggressive and defiant is estimated to cost about $5000 a case with a success rate of 70 per cent. The same behaviour at the age of 25 costs $20,000 and has a success rate of only 20 per cent.

Earliest-possible intervention works best and costs less.

Children who are at risk of progressing to serious adult offending are easier to identify between the ages of 10 and 15. The single most powerful indicator of a trajectory to serious adult offending is early repeat offending as a child.

The obvious risk factors include failure at school, substance abuse, deviant friends and a family that has problems, poor supervision, criminal parents and child abuse.

The remedies that work are fairly simple: re-entry to school, with some incentive for doing well, better parenting, a complete ban on alcohol and drug use, new social activities and friends.

Interventions with these kids cost about $7000 each. If one in four of them would move on to a lifetime of offending without the intervention, and one in three interventions works, we save about $36 in future offending for every dollar we spend.

Once children become teenagers, the outlook for reforming them under our present system is not good. More than half the teenagers who enter the adult justice system are reconvicted within one year of ending their sentence. About 80 or 90 per cent are reconvicted within five years. We have to do better than that.

Dangerous teenage offenders who commit violent and sexual offences will still need to go to prison. But for others, "About Time" suggests intensive rehabilitation in day-reporting centres designed to teach life skills and place the teens in jobs.

Attendance would be compulsory five days a week for six months, and might be accompanied by night curfews and electronic monitoring.

The units are significantly cheaper to run than prisons and are likely to be far more effective in preventing reoffending.

Some non-violent young offenders are better treated and cured outside the toxic mix present in our prisons.

If we just write off teenagers when they first enter the adult justice system, in most cases we are accepting a lifetime of crime will result. That also means accepting that they will spend a lifetime creating victims of their offending.

These preventive measures are not quick fixes, but they are effective.

If we do everything I have recommended, we will reduce imprisonable offending by about 17 per cent a year, eventually.

Some criminals cannot and will not change. We will keep the public safe from their offending through tough new sentencing and parole legislation.

That approach needs to be complemented by doing what we can to prevent offenders being created in the first place.

The approach I want to see boils down to keeping the public safe by turning people away from a life of crime and reducing reoffending.