KEY POINTS:
An election campaign wouldn't be the same without a dose of law and order hysteria and a brand new prison offered up to solve it. Last weekend on cue, National's law and order spokesman Simon Power was pledging a new jail within three years.
This is the same Mr Power who less than a year ago was on his high horse about the last 500 extra prison beds having cost taxpayers nearly $1 million each. So how many million-dollar beds is this election promise going to add to National's porkometer total?
And why? Can he produce any cost-benefit analysis to show that the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars he's going to spend incarcerating more New Zealanders will solve anything?
At last year's National Party conference in Auckland, Mr Power admitted "the overall offence rate is fairly stable". He did express alarm at the increased intensity of crimes committed by young offenders, but cautioned against locking them up.
"Placing a young first-time offender into the adult criminal system would be like sending a hungry mind to an academy of crime. We have to make sure that's not their only option. We have to show we are not devoid of compassion and ideas when there's a chance to turn their lives around."
He added: "The increasing intensity of these crimes points to something missing in the development of the offender, and that is empathy. They often come from families who live on the fringes of our society, who don't follow its shared rules and norms."
Funny how his tune changes when an election campaign creeps up on us.
Last month he spoke at the Prison Fellowship's 25th anniversary conference where similar criticisms of the lock 'em up and throw away the key philosophy were voiced. Guest speakers, Baroness Vivien Stern and Professor Andrew Coyle, both from the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, later said they were astounded at the high rate of imprisonment in New Zealand and urged us to consider alternatives.
For a beautiful, peaceful country like New Zealand, such a high rate is ridiculous, said Baroness Stern.
"I would have thought that ideas of equality and justice would have been stronger in the face of pressure to lock up New Zealanders."
Professor Coyle, a British prison governor for 25 years, advanced the idea of "justice reinvestment". He said the cost of running New Zealand prisons rose from $660 million in 2006 to $778 million in 2007 and asked whether distributing these considerable resources in other ways might not "give us a better return on our investment".
He said in the United States they've coined a phrase "million-dollar blocks", clusters of apartments or houses where a million dollars each year is spent sending some people who live there to prison.
"This expenditure appears to bring little long-term benefit to the community since the vast majority of these men are likely to reoffend on return."
He says policy makers are now examining whether the cash would be better spent on "rebuilding the social fabric of the community - schools, healthcare, public spaces, etc."
Local prison reform campaigners, headed by a former head of the prison service, Kim Workman, have taken up this theme, noting that it costs $92,000 to keep an offender in a New Zealand prison for a year. With some streets in South Auckland home to at least 10 prisoners, this makes them $2 million to $3 million blocks. Imagine, they suggest, the long-term impact on the quality of life such expenditure would have on these communities.
Even viewed purely on a pragmatic level, locking up more and more people is not working. For years we've been jailing the bad and the mentally ill with ever increasing vigour. In 1995 there were 4500 in prison. By 2001 numbers had risen to 6000 and by September 2007, 8400. Currently the figure is 7700 on the way up again.
Despite this prison population explosion, the crime wave crisis continues unabated, according to the lock 'em up brigade, or offending rates remain "fairly stable" if you believe Mr Power.
Professor Coyle notes that at around 197 per 100,000 New Zealanders, our incarceration rate is almost twice that of most continental Western European countries and is fast approaching that of Libya, Azerbaijan and Brazil. He argues that many of the people we criminalise are victims themselves, and would be more sensibly treated outside prison walls for mental health or drug and alcohol problems and/or for minor but persistent antisocial behaviour.
This is supported by figures from Associate Professor Sandy Simpson, clinical director of the Auckland regional Forensic Psychiatric Service, who estimates that 15 per cent of prisoners are suffering from serious mental illness - psychotic illness, bipolar disorder and major depression - and 80 per cent have substance misuse problems.
The clincher surely is that locking people up doesn't make us any safer. Of prisoners released between March 2000 and 2006, more than half are expected to commit at least one new crime within two years.
In the United States the prison population has grown eight times since 1970. Department of Justice figures report that one in every 32 American adults is under some kind of correctional supervision, either locked up, on parole or probation. Yet crime continues to go up and down regardless.
