Reducing Fiscal Pressures in the Justice System

A paper from New Zealand Church Leaders

Introduction

1. The New Zealand criminal justice system is currently facing a watershed moment in its history. The criminal justice policies of the past 10 years have produced a situation that is no longer socially or economically sustainable. The prospect of spending an additional $1b in the criminal justice system over the next four years is more than this nation can currently contemplate.

2. Over the past 10 years, our prison population has increased by 53.5%. Penal policies over the past two decades have created a prison system that is too big to fail. To keep it safe and in good working order requires constant feeding – taking essential resources from other government agencies – and interventions to more effectively prevent offending or reoffending. Yet our prison system is still unable to provide the focused interventions that are needed. It is therefore also a system that is too big to succeed.

Why Church Leaders Care About the Criminal Justice System

3. Historically, the Christian Church has provided care for many caught up in the justice system – as victims or offenders. This heritage continues today. Our involvement and interest is not a matter of choice or chance. At the core of Christian belief are understandings around issues of repentance, forgiveness, justice and restoration, all of which point towards the necessity of people of faith (and Christian organisations) being involved in the care of prisoners and victims, and in the wider debate about the criminal justice system.

The Current Situation

4. Jean Jacques Rousseau once said, "I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery." In the past couple of years, we have favoured a risk-free criminal justice system over the ideal of humane containment and therapeutic treatment. The National Health Committee’s report on prisoners’ health finds that crowding, exposure to violence, illicit drugs, lack of purposeful activity, separation from family networks and emotional deprivation, lead to prisoner deterioration. The regime in many prisons sees prisoners locked in their cells, often with someone they don’t like, for 16 to 20 hours a day. Inmates are without work, recreation and, most of all, without hope.

5. Of the additional $700m expenditure on growing our prison estate over the next three years, only $11m (about 1.5%) will be spent on rehabilitation in the form of drug treatment. This means only 1000 of the 6000 prisoners requiring drug treatment will receive it by 2014. The remaining money will go to restraint activities.

Fiscal Pressures and Public Opinion 

6. In a speech on 14 August 2010, the Hon Bill English said, “At a time when funding is tight, we have to find ways to foot the bill for tougher sentences for serious criminals, which the public demands.”

7. We are not aware of any properly-conducted research that informs us about current public attitudes to crime and punishment in New Zealand. Recent social research in comparative countries with similar punitive levels yields surprising results. While there has been an increase in punitive attitudes in recent years, when one digs underneath the initial reaction, a different picture emerges. A recent UK survey shows that:

• The public prefer community-based sentences to prison for vulnerable groups such as children, those who have been victims of abuse, and those who suffer from mental and physical illness.

• Less than one-third believe prison is effective in reducing re-offending, and about 85% believed that young people should not be sent to prison.

• Over three-quarters (77%) believe that community work coupled with rehabilitation programmes would be more appropriate for drug addicts than a custodial sentence.

• There is huge support for community sentences that require offenders to ‘pay back’ by way of reparation and community sentence.

8. Research continues to demonstrate that the public want more and better alternatives to custody, and that they want the underlying causes of crime to be tackled. That view seems to be supported by Sir Peter Gluckman, the Chief Science Adviser to the Prime Minister, who in a recent interview on “Q and A”, said;
“The evidence is overwhelming. If you could invest more in the earlier years, your expenditure in later years will be less. For example, some of the best programmes overseas, which have been well evaluated, are reporting 40% reductions in crime rate, massive increases in earning capacity of young people, greater entry into employment.”

9. We (Church leaders) want to communicate our concern at the lack of progress in addressing the causes of crime and in reducing the prison population. Phase 1 of the Effective Interventions strategy, introduced in July 2006, was intended to reduce the prison population and reduce crime. Cabinet decisions saved an estimated 550 prison beds.

10. The Drivers of Crime (November 2009) proposals included antenatal and early parenting support services, treatment of behavioural problems in children and young people, the reduction of harm from alcohol, managing low-level offenders, and offering pathways out of offending. The March 2010 Budget “Strategic Choices” approach talked about changes to parole and a range of measures to reduce the prison population, including changes to sentencing and parole, alternatives to prison, and improving court efficiency. We are disappointed at the extent of the action on these policies.

11. Changing the Criminal Justice system will certainly be a challenge. There are 8000 men, women and children in prison. Whatever decisions are taken now – by way of sentencing reform – that number is unlikely to fall noticeably in the immediate months ahead. At best, it may stabilise. Getting from here to the sunlit uplands of a small, properly-resourced prison estate, supported by effective interventions at either side, would be difficult at any time. In present circumstances, it will be fraught with risks, political and operational. But it can be done. New York State in the US reduced its prison population by 17% last year by establishing drug courts and moving offenders out into the community. Within the US, fiscal pressure has resulted in a range of initiatives, which resulted last year in an overall reduction in the imprisonment rate of 0.5%, the first reduction in 20 years. It can be done! We believe that there is a public mandate for shifting resources within the justice system to achieve a better outcome. We would want to support the government in that endeavour.

12. What we cannot contemplate is yet another political debate on law and order between rival parties that reduces criminal justice to a numbers game. Sometimes it seems that the measure of success is solely about whether a government has spent more public money and locked up more people for longer than its predecessor. The consequence of this is that more and more offenders have been warehoused – sometimes in outdated facilities – as we spend vast amounts of public money on a growing prison estate and ever-more prisoners.

13. Too often, prison has proved a costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens. Indeed, experience indicates that our worse prisons produce tougher criminals. Many an individual has gone into prison without a drug problem and come out drug dependent. Some petty prisoners make new hardened criminal friends with whom they associate on release. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And in the short time they are in prison, many end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families.

The Bottom Line

14. What really matters is that the criminal justice system does a better job of making sure that when offenders emerge from the criminal justice system, they are less likely to commit another crime.

15. In summary then, we support a criminal justice strategy based on the following seven principles: 

• We are concerned primarily with keeping communities and people safe. Not just for now, but for our children and their children and grandchildren. We want a long-term, sustainable public safety strategy.

• We want a strong criminal justice system where offenders are held accountable, where the needs of victims are understood and honoured, where the impact on family and whanau and communities is taken into account, and where all parties are treated fairly, with dignity and respect.

• We believe a strong public safety system is possible while reducing the size and cost of the prison system.

• Community sentencing and parole can play an important role in reducing crime. The public will support reducing prison time for low-risk, non-violent offenders and reinvesting savings to create stronger and more effective community sentencing that holds offenders accountable for their crimes and requires offenders to make reparation available to victims of crime.

• There are now more than 46,000 people on community sentences in this country, eight times more than there are in prison. Each prisoner costs close to $100,000 a year, while the average cost per offender on a community-based sentence or order is $9.92 per day or $3621 per year. Yet 52% of released prisoners return to prison within five years of getting out. If we are serious about public safety, we have to do a better job making sure that low-level offenders stay crime- and drug-free. That means not spending so much to lock up non-violent offenders, and shifting some of those prison dollars into a stronger system of community punishment, accountability, rehabilitation and support.

• Prisons are a government spending programme, and just like any other government programme, they should be put to the cost/benefit test. It costs about $79 dollars per day to keep someone in prison, but only about $3.50 to supervise someone on probation. The government should analyse the prison population to identify offenders in expensive prison cells who can be safely and effectively supervised in the community at a lower cost. Taxpayers should be getting a better return on their public safety investment.

• Funds spent on imprisoning offenders could be more productively spent in local community-based initiatives designed to tackle the underlying “drivers of crime” that give rise to offending behaviour. We must look at the amount of resources – financial and otherwise – being expended on the criminal justice system, evaluate what we, as members of the public and taxpayers, get from this expenditure, and consider whether there might be other ways of re-distributing these considerable resources to gain a better return on our investment.

• Maori over-representation in the criminal justice system, as victims and offenders, is the subject of ongoing public debate. Wide concern about this issue needs to be matched by empirical research. Recent social research indicates that positive changes in social behaviour of individual Maori people is achieved by focusing on the collective of whanau – and vice versa. Whanau is a pre-eminent site of change and transformation. We recommend further research into the transformative potential of whanau.

Future considerations

Church leaders recognise the difficulty facing government in considering alternatives  approaches to crime and punishment at a time when the electorate at large continues to have trust in a heavily-punitive prison system to deliver less crime and stop people re-offending. If government feels it would be valuable, we would be willing to try and assist by creating occasions for a wider public debate on alternative approaches to issues of crime and punishment.

Church leaders would also encourage government to consider setting up a Ministerial Advisory Group on criminal justice issues. This group could independently review the effectiveness of current government spending and activity in the criminal justice area, suggest alternative approaches, and engage with the public on the acceptability and effectiveness of implementing alternative approaches into public policy.