Te Radar: Bamboozling the public with truthful prison sentencing

Helen Clark this week stated that our prisons have been filled by what appeared to have been a form of sentencing creep.

Clearly, what she really meant to say was that we have, in the past few years, filled our jails by sentencing creeps.

Regardless, the net result is that our prisons are crammed tighter than journalists in a taxi on a Winston Peters foreign junket.

According to the Government's new directive, prisoners will now be required to serve two-thirds of their sentence before they are eligible for parole, but as the duration of the sentence they serve will be lowered, the two-thirds they are mandated to complete is, in actuality, exactly the same as the one-third they serve currently.

No doubt the powers that be simply assume that this two-thirds period looks and sounds harsher to the innocent eye of the general public against whom said transgressors have transgressed.

This they call Truth In Sentencing.

The only truth in this is that all right-thinking people are left feeling confused, as it seems that their newly appointed Sentencing Council's task is not to monitor prisoners' sentences, but rather to actually construct literal sentences to bamboozle the public.

This entire scheme is part of the Government's quest to empty the prisons, although they aren't using that particular phrase.

Rather, they say that it is to save money by not having to construct additional new prisons, despite Taito Philip Field's apparent ability to source cheap labour.

To date we have spent $1 billion on new jails, which has provided 2000 more beds, a cost of a mere $500,000 a bed.

Compared with this, the cost of home detention, which is to be increasingly offered as a sentencing option, is incomparably cheaper.

This is true even if we have to provide those sentenced with a home of their own to live in.

And why shouldn't people be sentenced to home detention? After all, if incarcerated prisoners have access to drugs, alcohol and, it seems, prostitutes, why not let them stay home.

Even if we, the taxpayers, were to pay them $1000 a week to subsist, it would still be saving money on the average cost of housing them in prison.

So, the answer it seems, according to Labour, is to reduce the numbers of people sent to prison while at the same time being seen to be tough on crime.

This is of course happening at a time when we are informed by those whose task it is to baffle us with numbers that the crime rate has been falling, and in fact has rarely been lower.

But we are told that this has little, if anything, to do with the fact that there are now more people imprisoned than ever.

That these changes come at a time when the Government itself is accused of criminal activity comes as no surprise.