KEY POINTS:
Columnist Tapu Misa agrees with former Ombudsman Mel Smith that we cannot have a rational debate on crime and punishment and, therefore, need a royal commission on the subject. I agree with them but for entirely different reasons.
Misa refers to "a punitive treadmill" that continues to pick
up speed and laments an alleged lack of judicial compassion because of public disapproval of it. Her theme is that we have become a much more punitive society. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
The reality is that we have become a much more violent society, and our imprisonment rates should actually be much higher. The environments in our prisons should arguably also be more, rather than less, punitive.
Misa trots out the old saw that our imprisonment rate is the second-highest in the developed world, behind the United States, without also revealing that we are second by a country mile - the rate of incarceration in the US is about 750 per 100,000 of population, while ours is about a third of that.
The more important question is, of course, whether our high imprisonment rate is justified. The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding yes. Put simply, we have high rates of imprisonment because we have much higher levels of violent crime than we used to, and that cannot be disguised by sophistry about violence being mainly suffered by the young, the single, and those in poor areas.
Our annual homicide rate is now about 2 per 100,000 of population, compared with less than 1 per 100,000 for most of the last century. It has become a cliche and thus doubted by many that we used to have two murders a year; now we have two a week.
Unfortunately, those figures are not wishful thinking about an imaginary golden age, but verifiable fact. And the increase has nothing to do with increases in population; rates of homicide per 100,000 allow us to compare New York with New Plymouth, and what they show is homicide rates have increased by 120 per cent in real terms in 50 years. Why?
There are a hundred possible reasons or combinations of reasons. The one explanation liberals like Misa and the former ombudsman will not even consider is that it is now much harder to get sent to prison, and if criminals do get there, they now build their biceps in well-equipped gyms, rather than by breaking rocks in quarries. Would changing our prisons back to places to be feared work? Who knows, but there is evidence it might.
Some years ago former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani introduced the now well-known Broken Windows policy under which the New York Police Department no longer ignored minor crime, but arrested anyone seen urinating in the streets, fighting in bars, or hitting their wives.
Over the next 10 years or so, New York City went from being one of the most dangerous places in the US to one of the safest. The liberal academic response to claims that Broken Windows had caused the drop in homicide rates was a fevered search for any explanation other than that for the decrease. The reason is that such simplistic cause-and-effect relationships are anathema to people such as those who make our penal policy, which proudly asserts that our prisons must have underfloor heating and gyms most of us cannot afford to belong to because "you go to prison as punishment, not for punishment".
Far from being on a punitive treadmill, it is actually quite difficult to get sent to prison today - only repeated offending, serious violence or property or drug offences involving a very large sum will do it. Thirty or so years ago, one went to prison for minor assaults.
I recently read a biography of Elton John, which included a passage about two assaults by John's then manager in New Zealand in 1974. The assaults were not particularly serious - no weapons were used - but John's manager served a month in Mt Eden, his appeal to the equivalent of the High Court having been roundly rejected.
By all means let's have a royal commission on crime and punishment, but to be of any use, it must listen to all informed persons such as former British prison psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple, not just the usual suspects from the liberal left.
Such a wide-ranging inquiry with wide-open terms of reference may not produce the kind of recommendations Misa and the former ombudsman would like.
* David Garrett is an Auckland barrister.
