Unlikely pair find common ground in prison junket

One of the strangest couples on the Japan Air Lines/Air New Zealand flight from Frankfurt via Tokyo to Christchurch last weekend must have been Garth McVicar and Kim Workman.

Mr McVicar, the Sensible Sentencing Trust founder who has been the scourge of politicians who are "soft on crime", spent most of Waitangi Day in the air with Mr Workman, the liberal former deputy secretary of justice who is now head of the Prison Fellowship.

"He was fantastic, a really genuine guy. He's done a lot of work with offenders," Mr McVicar said.

Mr Workman was slightly more guarded. "We got on well. I think there are some things we agree on," he said.

The odd pair were invited to Europe at taxpayers' expense by Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor to look for ways of reducing New Zealand's fast-rising prison population, which is now proportionately higher than any other developed country except the United States.

Mr O'Connor stayed on for a tobacco control conference in Geneva, but Mr McVicar and Mr Workman returned together on Tuesday.

Mr McVicar said their first surprise came when they arrived at the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College, London.

"They use New Zealand as an example of what not to do - how our prison population is escalating and our level of violent crime is increasing," he said.

"They educate other countries on what is working on a worldwide basis since New Zealand is an example of what not to do. That was possibly a bit of a shock to all of us."

Both were impressed by "open prisons" they saw in Britain and the Netherlands, where prisoners go out to work during the day, return to jail at night, and stay with their families at weekends.

"I think we should do that," Mr McVicar said. "They have sorted out what they call the hard-core recidivists, who stay in the closed prison system and they don't put huge resources into that end of it.

"They do have the opportunity at some stage of their sentences to come into that half-open prison system, but not at the very early stage of their sentences when some of the other offenders might."

He said he was "a big fan of community work", provided it was properly enforced.

"If the Government are going to implement changes, they have to take the public with them, and that means that nothing we do is seen as a soft option," he said.

"If you commit a crime, you have to pay the price for that crime. That philosophy must stay. The only debate as far as I'm concerned is whether it should be in prison or whether you should be out there working, repaying your debt in other ways."

Mr Workman, in turn, took a leaf out of the get-tough lobby's script after seeing the "huge problem" with drugs in the Netherlands, where drugs have been decriminalised.

"They have all these very seriously addicted drug offenders," he said. "If there was any lesson that came out of that, it was that we shouldn't liberalise the drug laws more than we have."

In Finland, both men noted that prison numbers have gone up again after a deliberate policy cut the imprisonment rate from around 200 in 100,000 people in 1950 to around 50 today. New Zealand's rate has doubled since 1980 to 164 in 100,000.

"The Finnish population feels they have gone a little too far, and what's happening is a change in the society because they are now starting to get drug offenders coming in from Russia and Estonia," Mr Workman said.

Mr McVicar said New Zealand could learn from a system used in Finland, the Netherlands and New South Wales, where the state pays reparation to victims of crimes and then extracts the money from the wages or welfare benefits of criminals when they leave jail.