Lindsay Mitchell: NZ's rarely-reported plummeting prison population
- Administrator
- Dec 18, 2022
- 2 min read
Appalling crime story after appalling crime story gets reported.
But media rarely report on the big decline in New Zealand's prison population.
There are various possible explanations for the reduction including demographic change, policy changes in police and justice procedures, and/or less imprisonable crime being committed. Government politicians claim less crime is being committed, especially by youth, "according to the statistics". But the statistics they use - apprehension, prosecution and conviction - rely on those activities actually occurring. If the police are instructed not to pursue a fleeing vehicle, then the ensuing apprehension etc. is less likely to happen.
When Labour became government Kelvin Davis stated a goal of reducing the prison population and set about doing so. This is one policy goal they've actually achieved. But at what cost?
The prison population reduced by over twenty percent between September 2019 and 2022. It could be said that one in five people who should be in prison are not so it's hardly surprising the country is experiencing a "crime wave". But that proposition is barely provable.
What we can usefully look at is how New Zealand compares to two very similar countries - Australia and the United Kingdom.
The first chart shows the change in numbers:
The large difference in prison population numbers disguises the degree of change so I've plotted percentage-change separately:
The last grouping shows that between 2019 and 2022 Australia (-4.8%) and the UK (-3%) also saw prison population falls but they are much smaller than NZ's (-20.7%)
The deviation implies NZ's decline is very much a matter of policy and not the social and demographic factors that affect prison populations.
You will note from the first chart that the NZ prison population is starting to climb again. A campaign to attract more staff to Corrections has been high profile. The government may now be abandoning their experiment.
Tragically it is too late for some though.
Bill English may have been right when he described prisons as a fiscal and moral failure. They certainly don't rehabilitate every inmate. They don't even come close. Far more needs to be done within prisons in that regard.
But prisons serve another purpose. They protect the public from dangerous people. That aspect of their place in society seems to have been overlooked in recent years.
Lindsay Mitchell blogs here
How come our fathers and grandfathers got it right when they didn't have to lock their doors when they went out? Prison wasn't the holiday camp it is now where the criminals have rights given by woke politicians. Pedophiles when released are still pedophiles, the criminally insane are still insane because Helen Clark shut down most of the asylums. Drug dealers still deal inside when supplied by visitors and every inmate knows that the system can be gamed. Nothing will change as long as National and Labor install dumb-arse politicians who make dumb laws and dumb-arse citizens who still expect things will get better if they vote them in again. The dumb leading the dumb!
Yet another success from the Ardern regime.
Under Ardern’s “ leadership “ the utterly useless Kelvin Davies has been emptying our prisons on an industrial scale.
Cuddles Coster remains stoic in his “ policing by consent “ policy as it would be “ racist “ to actually enforce the law as 99% of us require.
And they collectively wonder why a massive rise in violent crime is occurring !
Port Moresby is a law abiding paradise compared to our lawless, divisive and fractured country.
Ardern, Davies and Coster are nothing but criminal enablers and traitorous to the people they are charged to protect.
I did a little bit of jail when I was a young wanker, jail is not the fixer of our societies problems, but it is the best place to hold really nasty people who lack any morals or decency and humanity, I have been told from front line police that they are not to arrest any of a certain culture unless they can get a real conviction, and even then that is not guaranteed, why do you think so many police are leaving the force and having nervous breakdowns, as one officer said to me, the force is full of drug addicts, as in antidepressants and other nerve settling drugs just to keep these officers operating on the front line,…
I have the type of job where I regularly come into contact with ex prisoners. Those who are successfully going about their lives all learned a trade while serving their time, and don’t dabble in drug’s anymore. The non successful repeat offenders have significant serious mental health issues that come with aggressive and impulsive behaviour. If we could actually focus on improving our mental health care for these people when back in the community by better access to drs / medicines, activities to keep them occupied and healthy food, we would take away a lot of the stress and lack of routine that results in the escalation to repeat offending. In my model for solutions, those repeat offending would b…
Protecting the population from the most dangerous people in it, is one the things I fear is being forgotten and I want to see it remembered and restored to its proper place. Also I value justice being served for justice's sake. The reason being if you use emotion or reverse racism for example, to determine who and how people are punished, you make ours an even more unjust society than it is now.