The record size of our prison muster is bad news, no matter how the Minister Judith Collins spins it.
 
There are currently over 9,000 people in prison and that number is predicted to go as high as 10,000 by year’s end.
 
The burgeoning numbers fly in the face of the government’s policy to reduce recidivism. And overcrowded prisons will only exacerbate the problem.
 
Resources to manage double bunked units will have to increase to alleviate the stressful and dangerous conditions overcrowding creates for prisoners and staff. This is something the League has noticed in prisons recently. Staff are being asked to do more and more and at a certain point something has to give.
 
Managing larger numbers will also mean fewer rehabilitation programmes as resources are diverted.
 
These issues are not making society safer. The vast majority of people in prison are on fixed term sentences and will therefore be released. It is in all our interests to ensure they are less, not more, likely to offend on release.
 
New Zealand’s imprisonment rate is already uncomfortably high, and is a black mark on its international reputation. Furthermore, it is a heavy tax on the public purse.
 
Make no bones about it, growing prison numbers are bad news. Unless, perhaps, you’re in the game of private prisons.
 
 
For comment on this contact Jolyon White 027 612 2230

Jo Pert was attacked and killed while running in the morning in Remuera – one of the country’s safest and most exclusive neighbourhoods, while Cunxiu Tian was killed in her own home in a quiet Te Atatu cul-de-sac. Pert was a mother of two, and Tian was a grandmother. These killings were tragic, surprising, and brutal, and they have struck a chord with the public. Pert’s death recently sparked a 5km ‘Run For Her’, where 200 women ran through Auckland to ‘reclaim the streets’ in which they no longer felt safe.
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This laudable effort highlights the issue in these murders: if we aren’t safe going out for a morning run, or even in our own home, where are we safe? And if we aren’t safe anywhere, why isn’t something being done about it?
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Murders aren’t commonplace in New Zealand, but they do happen reasonably regularly. The average murder rate in New Zealand in the 2000s was 54.6, or just over one a week. The reason that we don’t hear about them all is that the majority are solved very quickly, with a killer who is strongly connected to the victim in some way, and whose motivation is obvious.

The thing is, we’re safer than we realise. Internationally, this murder rate is among the lowest, even among first-world nations. More than that, the murder rate per capita is actually falling: between 1985 and 1992 we averaged 21 murders per million head of population, but from 2004 to 2008 that number was only twelve.

The Howard League’s own Dr Jarrod Gilbert highlighted this issue in his column last year after the tragic death of Blessie Gotinco, pointing out that not only is the murder rate declining, but that other violent crime is falling too. Where the majority of the public will admit to a perception that crime is rising, New Zealand is currently a safer place than it’s been in at least 30 years, and crime continues to fall gradually. Although we’ve sadly seen two in less than a month, murders where the killer is unknown to the victim are extremely rare.

Murders like this fascinate the public, and make easy fodder for journalists and politicians who have more to gain from spreading fear than fact.

‘Run For Her’ has it right: we should feel safe on the streets, because we are.

​After 15 months in the wilderness, Judith Collins is back in John Key’s cabinet as the Minister of Corrections.
 
Collins initially made cabinet after National won power in 2008, when she was given charge of both Corrections and Police portfolios.
 
Collins went after ‘boy racers’ earning her the nickname ‘Crusher Collins’ for legislation she introduced to crush cars. The law was seldom used but Collins said she was the Minister “who brought back deterrence”.
 
Be that as it may, following Bill English’s prisons are a “moral and fiscal failure speech” in 2010, Collins oversaw a significant shift in culture with the Department of Corrections. She expanded drug treatment and facilities for mothers with babies in prisons. She also banned smoking in all of the country’s prisons. 
 
Under Collins’ watch, Serco were given contracts to run Mt Eden prison.
 
In late 2011, Collins gave up Police and Corrections but became Minister of Justice.
 
Embroiled in scandals regarding business dealings of her husband and allegations of Dirty Politics relating to her relationship and dealings with Cameron Slater, Collins was forced to resign. But she was never far from the limelight and didn’t stay away from contentious issues – earlier this year she supported police who broke the law in the Red Devils gang case.
 
Collins is back in from the cold as Corrections and Police Minister for a few reasons but one is that the incumbent corrections minister, Sam Lotu-liga, simply wasn’t up to it. Although in fairness, the Serco scandal that haunted him was more Collins’ making than his own.
 
Exactly what Collins we will get is very unclear, she appears to be attempting to re-jig her image. Whatever the case, it’s likely things will not be dull.

Many nations’ justice systems are happy to give out extremely long sentences, with judges in countries like Australia, the US and Spain handing down punishments in the hundreds or even thousands of years. The longest prison sentence ever was given in Thailand in 1989, when Chamoy Thipyaso was sentenced to 141,078 years in jail for running a massive pyramid scheme that defrauded 16,000 people.
New Zealand’s longest serving prisoner is Alfred Vincent, a paedophile who was convicted of a string of indecent assaults in 1968 and sentenced to preventative detention, which means that he can remain in prison as long as a parole board assesses him as continuing to pose a threat to the community. In the 47 years since he has repeatedly failed to gain parole. After being declined at his most recent parole hearing, Vincent will have served a half century by the time of his next hearing. His lawyer plans to take his case to the United Nations Working Party on Arbitrary Detention, but the parole board’s decision cites a “a strong and persistent pattern of highly sexualised interest and behaviour” that makes him a danger to the community and “is not amenable to treatment.”
Fifty years will place him among the world’s longest serving prisoners, just behind the 55 years of the UK’s John Staffen, a serial killer who died in prison in 2007, although he is unlikely to ever serve as long as Paul Geidel, a murderer who was imprisoned in America for 68 years, and released in 1980 at the age of 86.
Given the issues involved in releasing a man such as Vincent, it’s poossible he will never be set free. Now 76, with almost two thirds of his life spent behind bars, he would be a man long out of his own time, who would need care, supervision and support almost constantly. When Paul Geidel was released, he was so frail that he went straight into a nursing home.
On his own, Vincent represents a curiosity of the justice system – an arguably necessary response to the unavoidable problem that he poses. But he is the tip of a growing iceberg. As we can see in the graphs below, use of long and indeterminate prison sentences in New Zealand has risen substantially since the mid-1980s:

Graphs via the Department of Corrections.
Where prisoners on long sentences (2 years or more) were once a minority in jail, they now comprise around 70% of the prison population. Unsurprisingly, this increase in longer sentences correlates generally with the beginning of a rise in prison populations in the late 1980s.
In the background, use of indeterminate sentences has increased as well, to the point where offenders on life sentences and preventative detention (like Vincent) now form ten percent of the prison population. To put it another way, in 1983 there were around 100 offenders on indeterminate sentences, while in 2013 there were around 750.
In the 1980s, this might have made a degree of sense – violent crime was on the rise, and locking offenders away seemed like a solution. But by the mid-1990s crime had peaked, and it has been decreasing ever since. Use of extremely long sentences however, has continued to expand. This approach may require a rethink.
Long sentences are expensive, but we have an appetite for them, and as long as that remains the case we’d better get used to seeing old men like Alfred Vincent in our jails and the unique problems that will pose. 

We have previously blogged about the law changes in Australia that is seeing New Zealanders who have served time in Australia deported to New Zealand.  The effects of this are becoming all too real for New Zealand, with agencies reporting that they sometimes have 5 minutes notice to pick up a former prisoner from Auckland airport and get them established with a new life.
 
Up to 200 New Zealanders are being held in detention centres in Australia, and may be deported back here if they have served more than a year in prison.  Their deportation puts additional strain on hardworking charities such as Prisoners Aid and Rehabilitation Society (PARS). Chief Executive of PARS, Tui Ah Loo, has noted that her organisation is expected to put up deportees in a motel, help them set up a bank account and IRD number and provide clothes and food.  This sort of support does not come cheap. However, the alternative – turning away someone in need and at risk – is certainly not an option.
 
PARS seldom, if ever, speak out in the media, so when they do we know that they mean business.  Tui has told Radio New Zealand that the intensity of support that deportees are needing from PARS has doubled in recent times, with funding and capacity running very thin.  In response, the Department of Corrections has funded PARS with a one-off $100,000 grant to assist deportees on their return to New Zealand.  This is a testament to both the urgency of the deportee situation, and the incredible work that PARS do.
 
Given that some former prisoners have lived in Australia for 35 years before being deported, they may not have family and support networks to help transition to a new life.  The work of PARS is designed to make this transition manageable.  It is an incredibly important task, as leaving former prisoners to their own devices in an unfamiliar setting is not the best way to avoid reoffending.  PARS supports people at risk and encourages them to become independent and responsible.  It really is a fantastic organisation and the $100,000 funding is recognition of this vital work.

​When issues of justice are in the media, things are not always as they seem – especially when we are dealing with Americans
 
In recent days a tale of a young boy, a broken wrist and an inability to hold a plate of food at a cocktail party, has taken international headlines by storm.
 
“I can’t hold a plate of hors d’oeuvre at a party” was the line from Jennifer Connell as she sued her 12 year old nephew for inadvertently breaking her wrist in an over enthusiastic hug.  She unsuccessfully sought $127,000 in damages from him in a US Court.
 
Once this hit the press, the backlash was immediate. “World’s worst aunt” said the Australian media. “Worst Aunt Ever” said the American Entertainment outlets.  #AuntFromHell was the go-to Twitter hashtag.  The way the media treated Jennifer Connell was nothing short of vilification.  The way the story took off on social media was astounding; “Hey did you hear about that crazy aunt that’s suing her nephew for giving her a hug?” was the chat at the office water cooler.
 
However, as days pass we can finally understand Connell’s side of the story.  A side so accurate and realistic that it is almost boring.  Almost. As it turns out, Connell had no choice but to sue her nephew, it was the only way she could access her insurance policy to pay for her care.  The insurance company initially offered her $1 to cover the cost of home care and two surgeries.  Her legal advice was that the nephew needed to be named as the defendant in order to get the insurance company to pay; she has no intention of taking money from him.
 
She described the ordeal as a “legal technicality.”  She quite rightly told NBC that people were quick to jump to conclusions without knowing the facts of the case.
 
From this we can take two things:  When it comes to issues even remotely close to crime and justice, we often need to look a bit deeper, and secondly, the god damn American health insurance system is as crazy as hell.

​​A major amendment to the New Zealand Parole Board Act came into effect just over a month ago. Parole hearings are an important part of how our justice system applies its discretion, giving offenders an opportunity to be released and monitored in the community if they can convince a board that they pose no further danger. The recent amendment made the following changes to the process:
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• Previously the parole board would see every offender every twelve months. Now if the board doesn’t believe that it is necessary, they can postpone convening for up to two years.
• For offenders serving sentences of more than ten years, hearings can be postponed for up to five years.
• This means that the board is able to give offenders longer periods to complete rehabilitation programmes, and can more complex requirements outside of the 12 month period.  
• Offenders can apply for a review of the decision to postpone hearings, and if that is unsuccessful can challenge the decision in the high court.

This is designed to reduce unnecessary load on the parole board, which has been seeing record numbers of hearings in recent years due to ever-expanding prison numbers. It also serves to avoid forcing victims to make new submissions every year if they wish to see an offender remain imprisoned.
There is no doubt that this law will reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings that the board has to deal with, but it also raises some potential issues that we’ll investigate and report back on here. 

​Recent law changes in Australia have meant that many non-Australian offenders are being deported to their home countries, including New Zealanders.

The amendment to Australia’s Immigration Act allows any foreign national who fails a “character test” to have their visa revoked, which includes anyone who has been sentenced to twelve months or more in Australian prison. Because the majority of these people don’t want to be deported, they’re ferried to detention centres where they’re held temporarily while their cases are worked out.

Because of the large numbers of New Zealanders living in Australia, this means that a lot of Kiwis have been caught up in this system, and are now stuck in these centres awaiting deportation, where they are now the second largest nationality after Iranians.

Australia has a network of detention centres, most of which are on neighbouring islands such as Nauru and Christmas Island in order to keep them out of sight and off the mainland. They have the capacity to hold thousands of detainees at once, the majority of whom are asylum seekers or refugees fleeing persecution and conflict in their home nations.
Running these centres is a familiar face: Serco. As well as building prisons here in New Zealand, The British security giant has a substantial presence in Australia.

Conditions in these centres are notoriously poor. They are often overcrowded and understaffed, and have high incidences of suicide among detainees, including one New Zealander. Prisoners there are reportedly fed out of buckets, kept in sweltering heat and sometimes not even given enough water, but the torture is in the uncertainty. Prisoners are held in these detention centres indefinitely, with months going by with little indication about when they’ll be released, or where they’re going when they do. Some are being held beyond the period of their original prison sentence, with no clear path to release in sight. It’s not even clear what rights these prisoners have in terms of processes, or who makes the decisions about where they’re sent.
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Refugees in these centres are said to have resorted to self-harm as a means of drawing attention to their cases, and have used hunger strikes, rioting and even evocative methods such as digging their own symbolic graves as means of protest against their detention.

​While around 80 offenders have already been deported to New Zealand, there are around 200 kiwis currently trapped in these centres. Some of these are kiwi only by technicality, such as one man who had lived in Australia since the age of 4, but had never nationalised himself because the distinctions between the two citizenships were largely meaningless, until now. He had worked, paid taxes and even started a family in Australia. For people in that situation, going “home” to New Zealand is about as good as being sent to a foreign country. Another such man recently took his own life while awaiting deportation in Goulburn’s Supermax Prison.

In some ways, it’s good that more attention is being drawn to the conditions that Australia keeps its refugees in. On the other hand though, it’s incredible that New Zealand citizens would be imprisoned under these conditions by any friendly nation, let alone Australia. The special relationship between our two countries, which has a history through the ANZACs and before, seems to have been erased with the flick of a pen.

It’s fair enough that Australia doesn’t want to look after other countries’ offenders. But they only need to be smarter about it. Here in New Zealand, deportation is handled individually on a case-by-case basis. Doubtless mistakes are made, but it should at least capture obvious cases, like if somebody has lived here since they were a child. And there’s no reason why it would take months in a refugee camp to figure that out.

In terms of New Zealand, if these offenders are sent here many will have no homes or any family to live with. They won’t have jobs, any possessions, or even any friends. Something needs to be done to resettle these people, not least because these conditions are known to produce reoffending.
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Because of increasingly nasty Australian politics, hundreds of our citizens are being left in situations not unlike refugees themselves. That’s a hell of a way to treat your mates.

Last week we got the news that Californian state officials have agreed to cut their use of solitary confinement in prisons significantly. This may be among the first real signs of change in America, following growing awareness that the scale of their prison system is unsustainable. This change has prompted us to take a look at the use of solitary confinement in New Zealand.

The US has a long history of using solitary confinement en masse as a weapon for controlling its prisoner population, which is the largest in the world, and among the highest per head of population. Prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for years on end, often simply because the prison cannot keep control of its oversized population. One American prisoner was recently released after spending a staggering 40 years in solitary confinement, while another remains imprisoned after 43. There are estimated to be as many as 80,000 prisoners held in solitary housing units, or SHUs.

Previously, confinement could be used if inmates were believed to be gang members, with no proof required and little appeal offered. Once in solitary, these offenders could be kept there indefinitely. SHUs will still be used to segregate those who are violent within the prison, but no longer indefinitely.

Solitary confinement is deliberately cruel. American SHUs are designed to reduce stimulation to a minimum, keeping prisoners away from human contact and allowing them only an hour’s exercise each day. Prisoners are often left with only a few books to read, and no television or radio. Contact with guards and visitors is limited, and takes place behind mesh and glass. This has been found to be incredibly detrimental to prisoners’ mental health, causing effects that include anxiety and depression, and can go as far as inducing psychosis, major perceptual distortions and self-harm. These symptoms can start to appear after as little as a few months. It is no surprise that so many are kept in solitary confinement indefinitely: after years in these conditions, many inmates simply become too dangerously unbalanced to be safe to release.

We use solitary confinement in New Zealand, but to nowhere near the same extent. Prisoners can be put in solitary as a punishment, or in cases where it is deemed to be necessary for their safety. Corrections rules require that prison directors “manage the prisoner off the segregation at the earliest opportunity”, and a segregation order expires after 14 days, at which point the prison must renew the order or return the prisoner to the general population. Segregation orders can’t be continued for more than three months without an application to a judge, and only then in further three-month periods.

That’s not to say that we haven’t had issues with our use of it here. Last year a report by a UN committee singled out some of New Zealand’s newly-built solitary units, calling them “tin cans”.

The late Peter Williams QC wrote an excellent article on the subject in 2012, in response to a 2010 case where an inmate in solitary confinement fatally punched a guard who was releasing him for his hour of exercise. He noted that it was uncertain exactly how many prisoners were being kept in solitary in New Zealand, and that it was very hard to gain access to these prisoners themselves. He quotes a letter from a prisoner, who observes that these practices do nothing but harm:

"Prisoners are driven over the brink by their dreary, monotonous routine. Each prisoner is contained in a small concrete box with no windows, with nothing to do, and where nothing constructive or rehabilitative is given. Sometimes they react irrationally - each prisoner is kept in these conditions for 23 hours a day."

Even with more moderate use this punishment seems to do more harm than good. These prisoners are kept away from rehabilitation services, and instead punished in a way that may only make them more dangerous. 

Over the last few years, the Netherlands has been gradually closing some of its prisons. These prisons are closing because they’re not needed anymore.

Dutch prisons have capacity for around 14,000 offenders, but are currently holding only 12,000. This decline is expected to continue.

This is in contrast to New Zealand, where we have two thirds as many prisons (8641 as of December 2014), but just over a quarter of the national population (the Netherlands has 16.9 million, to our 4.5). Rather than falling, our prison population is growing, and is predicted to continue growing slowly for the foreseeable future.

The absence of prisoners in the Netherlands is so profound that they have even begun renting space in their remaining jails out to nearby countries whose prisons are overcrowded. 

There are a number of reasons why imprisonment rates in the Netherlands are falling, including: a focus on rehabilitation, more relaxed drug laws, and the increased use of electronic monitoring as an alternative to prison. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but it’s the last one that’s interesting.

We use ankle bracelet electronic tagging in New Zealand a lot: there are 3232 offenders being electronically monitored at the moment, 1832 of whom are monitored using GPS, while the rest are simply held by communication between their bracelet and a transmitter in their home, which reports them if contact between the two is broken. The government is looking to expand this significantly.

Electronic monitoring has a lot of advantages over traditional imprisonment.

Firstly, it keeps offenders away from the influences of prison. It’s an old joke that prison is often like a “criminal university”, and many offenders will tell you that they learned the key tricks of trades like burglary or drug dealing while they were in prison. It’s well known that it can be easier to get drugs in prison than it is on the streets. Under electronic monitoring, this effect is limited to those bad influences keen enough to visit the offender at home.

Secondly, it’s much cheaper. In 2011, Corrections reports indicated that it cost $249 to keep a prisoner incarcerated for a single day, but only $58 to keep an offender on home detention. Per year, that’s $91,000 and $20,972 respectively. This means that if a prisoner can be kept on home detention there is a saving to the taxpayer of around 77%, which adds up quickly.

Thirdly, as we’ve covered before, home detention can be good for the community: it keeps families from being broken up, and allows offenders to keep their jobs. It also avoids the range of issues such as homelessness that can affect prisoners after their release. Sometimes we want offenders out of the community, or away from their families, but for the majority of offenders, remaining in the community is preferable.

Of course, the problem with electronic monitoring is that it isn’t a prison. If a prisoner was inclined to escape they’d have no trouble getting free of an ankle bracelet. Depending on the type of bracelet, this can be as easy as using scissors, or as hard as having access to a hacksaw or a few power tools. We learned last week that 18 people were on the loose, having removed their ankle bracelets and failed to report to probation or police.

Considering that we’re talking about leaving offenders alone with an ankle bracelet and nothing but time on their hands, this isn’t actually an especially high number: it’s only 0.5% of all of the offenders currently being monitored. And so long as the bracelets are properly monitored (and given the cost savings over prison, we can afford to make sure they are), breaching offenders should be back in more serious custody very quickly.

With that in mind, we’re happy see that the use of home detention as an alternative to prison is expanding. The one other lesson from the Dutch system that we need to remember, however, is that electronic monitoring isn’t any use without maintaining a focus on rehabilitation. Offenders in prison are targeted with a range of rehabilitation and education initiatives that aim to address the issues that caused their offending. As others have already pointed out, offenders on home detention may not get this same opportunities.