Jamie Whyte: Prison rate reflects society

There are 7500 New Zealanders in prison. Dr Warren Young, vice-president of the Law Commission, told a conference this month that this is a national shame.

Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor agrees. He told the same conference that our imprisonment rate is "shamefully high".

It is alarming to hear such people say such things. For they are profoundly wrong. They are wrong about the statistics, wrong about the right direction for prison policy and wrong about the location of shame.

Statistics first. New Zealand imprisons a relatively high percentage of its population: we have 180 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. Among developed nations, this puts us second only to the United States, which imprisons 700 out of every 100,000. This, I suspect, is what makes Young and O'Connor feel so ashamed.

It shouldn't. This is an absurd measure of the imprisonment rate, because it does not take into account the percentage of the population who are criminals.

New Zealand is a very criminal country. We have 100 crimes each year for every 1000 citizens. This compares to 90 in England, 24 in Spain and 20 in Ireland (to take a few examples).

As a percentage of crimes committed, we imprison very few people. We have 18 prisoners per 1000 crimes, compared to 13 in England, 33 in Ireland and 48 in Spain.

High rates of imprisonment correlate with low crime rates. Spain and Ireland have high imprisonment rates and low crime rates. New Zealand and Britain have low imprisonment rates and high crime rates.

But both countries are learning the lesson. Since 1993 the English prison population has grown from 49,000 to 73,000 and the number of crimes has fallen from 19 million to 11 million. New Zealand's prison population has increased by 30 per cent since 2000 and the crime rate has dropped by 10 per cent.

The same story can be told for the United States, where crime rates have fallen steadily as the imprisonment rate has climbed over recent decades.

Young thinks that increasing the prison population "will fundamentally change the structure and nature of New Zealand society in a way that I think none of us would want".

He is half-right. It will indeed change New Zealand. It will reduce the amount of crime we suffer. But why would none of us want that? Especially when prison is such a cheap way of cutting crime.

It costs about $65,000 to keep someone in prison for a year. That sounds like a lot. But it is money well spent.

Imagine a town of 500 adults that has caught its local criminal. They hold a town meeting to decide whether to spend the $130 per person required to send him to prison for a year. What do you think they would decide?

It would depend, of course, on the kinds of crimes he commits. But if he were a typical New Zealand criminal - if he would gladly smash your face in, break into your house at night or steal your car - then most people would consider $130 a bargain.

Add in the deterrence value of the conviction on other would-be criminals, and it is an even better buy. It is no surprise that the public consistently supports harsher prison sentences even though they must pay for them from their taxes.

Last year there were 23,000 violent crimes in New Zealand classified as serious assaults or worse. A civilised society cannot tolerate this kind of violence.

Most of these crimes should have resulted in a prison sentence. But most did not. How could they have when there are now only 7500 people in prison from all categories of crime?

Every year, there are thousands of miscarriages of justice in New Zealand. Not the innocent being convicted. That almost never happens. It is the other kind of injustice - the guilty going unpunished - that prevails.

As a consequence, New Zealanders suffer one of the worst crime rates among developed nations. Our criminal justice system is not doing its job.

But it is improving. The police are catching a greater proportion of offenders (the crime resolution rate is up to 41 per cent from 30 per cent in 1991), more are going to prison, and the crime rate is falling.

This is wonderful news. It is something to celebrate. That the vice-president of the Law Commission and the Corrections Minister should lament it is not simply bizarre; it is alarming. What, in their opinion, is the purpose of the criminal justice system?

Here is a simple multi-choice question that anyone seeking a position of responsibility in our criminal justice system should be required to answer correctly. A man commits a serious assault. He is arrested, convicted and imprisoned.

Who should feel ashamed? Is it:

a) the victim of the assault

b) the police

c) the trial judge

d) the prison guards

e) the politicians who decided that assault deserves a prison sentence

f) the criminal

Young and O'Connor believe the answer is e) - the politicians. They fail.

* Jamie Whyte is the author of Crimes Against Logic and a regular columnist in the Times of London.