Lizzie Marvelly: Mega-prison just a billion-dollar Band-Aid

When nearly half of the prison population commit further crimes within a year of release, can we rely on incarceration to keep society safe? Photo / Bob Harding

No one likes the thought of a criminal roaming the streets. The desire to keep our loved ones safe from "bad people" is an entirely natural instinct. The knowledge that offenders are locked up in prison and can't hurt our families – for now – may well help us to sleep easier at night.

But do prisons actually lower the crime rate? Do they prevent recidivism? Do they actually make society a safer place? Have we lulled ourselves into a false sense of security?

As much as I'm known for having a bleeding heart, I don't buy into the idea that convicted offenders as a whole are wayward children who will see the error of their ways and emerge from prison to become born again upstanding citizens.

There are some bad buggers out there who have committed heinous crimes. They deserve to be behind bars. And for a small group of hardened criminals, life imprisonment is imperative for community safety.

But – and this is a big but – those prisoners are by far the minority. In September of 2017, only 1.2 per cent of prisoners were classified as maximum security prisoners. Contrastingly, 28.2 per cent were minimum security prisoners and 24.3 were classified as low security.

Regardless of what security level a prisoner is classified as, they still take up a prison bed. That 28.2 per cent of the prison population that is classified as minimum security is still incarcerated, and still costing the state an enormous amount of money every year.

And consider this: in 2016, according to information released by Corrections under the Official Information Act to the New Zealand Drug Foundation, 799 prisoners were imprisoned for convictions of possession and/or use of an illegal drug or drug utensil. In a prisoner population of around 10,000, that's close to 8 per cent. If drug use were to be decriminalised, and those 799 drug users were treated by the health system rather than the justice system, that's one less fairly decent-sized prison we'd need.

But somehow, regardless of the logical arguments presented to reduce the prison population, people resist the idea. Why? Because it's seen as a punishment, and for the punitive among us, the knowledge that someone is "getting their just desserts" is more important than the reality that using prison as a punishment (and supposedly a deterrent) doesn't really work.

Take our recidivism rates as just one example of the failure of our prison system. In 2015/2016, 45.5 per cent of prisoners had been reconvicted within 12 months of leaving prison, while 31.7 per cent had returned to prison (and it gets worse after 24 months; by then 59.7 per cent had been reconvicted and 42.2 per cent had returned to jail).

I've often heard prison referred to as a crime university, simply teaching criminals more about crime. Which feels like an apt description. When nearly half of the prison population go on to commit further crimes within a year of release, can we really rely on incarceration to keep society safe? As Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias famously said, "criminal justice processes are largely irrelevant to crime reduction."

Interestingly enough, of those serving community sentences, only 28.4 per cent had been reconvicted in the 12 months since beginning their sentence, and just 6.1 per cent had been imprisoned. Could there be a better way to punish people than to alienate them from any support network they might have and lock them up with other criminals?

Other countries seem to think so. In Norway, they even have fascinatingly named 'open prisons' that are apparently more like university campuses. Prisoners are cycled from their initial security classification into lower and lower security settings, with the aim of aiding them in reintegrating into society.

Does it work? It works better than what we're doing. In Norway, 75 people per 100,000 are sent to prison. In New Zealand, we send 217 per 100,000. When prisoners leave prison in Norway, only 20 per cent of them are reconvicted within 2 years (compared with our 59.7 per cent).

Clearly, our corrections system isn't working. Tighter bail legislation passed in 2013 has caused our prison population to balloon, while recidivism rates have remained high. The majority of the rehabilitation programmes offered are reporting little or no statistically significant impact upon reoffending rates. We don't have enough prison beds. And we've never imprisoned as many people before as we are now.

We also have significant problems with racial over representation. Māori are severely overrepresented in prison, and structural racism almost certainly plays a role in the staggering rates of incarceration.

According to human rights lawyer Julia Whaipooti, Māori are 11 times more likely to be remanded in custody when charged with an offence than non-Māori charged with the same crime. If Māori are convicted of a crime, she believes that we are seven times more likely than non-Māori to be sentenced to a prison term.

Mental health and addiction also play a huge role in our prison problems. Corrections boss Ray Smith reportedly told MPs in 2017, "of the roughly 20,000 people going through prison each year, approximately 91 per cent of them have alcohol or drug addictions, or mental health issues over their lifetime. The number entering prison with those issues is 61 per cent".

Given statistics like that, it makes you wonder whether the health and social services systems failed prisoners long before they got to prison.

Basically, it's a dog's breakfast. We're facing an ever-growing prison population, ageing and inappropriate prison infrastructure, prisoners with significant needs, high recidivism rates, structural inequities and a new billion dollar mega prison that will only replicate more of the same. Whether or not to build it should be a question deferred as long as possible.

Long before we get to that stage, we need innovative reform. We need to take stock of what's not working, why it's not working, and how it can be fixed.

A billion dollars is a lot to spend on a band aid.