New Zealand Tourism Strategy 2010
   
Hon Matt Robson
Minister of Corrections

May 2001

Introduction

  1. Cabinet invited a nominated Ministers' Group to report to the Cabinet Social Equity Committee with a strategy to reduce the growth of inmate numbers and, over time, to bring about a reduction (CAB (00) M22/22 refers). This report is submitted by the Department of Corrections to the Minister of Corrections as Convertor of the Ministers' Group. The Terms of Reference approved by the Ministers' Group are attached as the Appendix. A Cabinet paper that lists recommendations to Cabinet concerning ways to further advance the options developed below accompanies this report.

  2. The first major factor that has shaped the content of the report is the fact that the most direct way of reducing inmate numbers is not appropriate in the current climate in New Zealand. Growth in inmate numbers is a problem that a number of governments have attempted to tackle. The strategy that has been attempted most frequently - 'decarceration' - involves either reducing the list of offences for which imprisonment is an option, or reducing sentence lengths, or both simultaneously. However, decarceration is likely to have limited public acceptability in New Zealand, given the results of the criminal justice referendum conducted in association with the last election, because decarceration would be seen widely as reducing public safety. Therefore, this report sets out a number of options for reducing imprisonment that either increase public safety, or at least do not reduce it. Reducing future victimisation is central to the options that are presented here.

  3. This report identifies three strategic directions for policy that reduce imprisonment while enhancing public safety, and these headings are used to organise the body of the report:

    • Crime prevention, which includes a planned and integrated range of social, educational, and correctional interventions that are directed towards identifying high need babies, children and youth who are at risk of becoming antisocial and interposing progressively higher barriers to progress towards chronic and serious adult offending. Based largely on the findings of longitudinal studies of children growing to adulthood, this section of the report applies the concept of 'interrupting trajectories to chronic adult crime' by early detection of high need cases and interventions based on international best practice. Four options are presented in this category.

    • Alternative sentencing, which here refers to diverting high-risk teenage offenders to intensive rehabilitation programmes provided in Day Reporting Centres, with the objective of providing intensive re-education and re-socialisation to improve their chances in the mainstream of society. It is suggested in this section that we need to get the right people into prison - so that diversion from imprisonment to alternative sanctions should only be considered where there is assurance that, overall, public safety will be increased. Two options are presented under this heading.

    • Rehabilitation of established offenders, many adult offenders re-offend on a number of occasions and may eventually be imprisoned and re-imprisoned. Rehabilitation programmes provided through the Department of Corrections Integrated Offender Management system address the factors contributing to each offender's continuing antisocial behaviour. Integrated Offender Management is currently funded to provide rehabilitative services for 18 percent of offenders entering the adult justice system.

    • The Department of Corrections estimates that a further $26m is required to extend coverage of rehabilitative services to all suitable offenders in the top half of the risk of re-offending range.

  4. In summary, this report introduces ten options for reducing the number of offenders who are imprisoned, organised under the three headings introduced above. Five ofthe options involve extensions to the Department of Correction's Integrated Offender Management programme, which provides research-proven rehabilitative services for offenders who are at high risk of re-offending. Four of the remaining five options involve an outline sketch of interventions that would be funded through other agencies, possibly social services, education, or youth justice. Two options are formulated to support Maori by using the strengths of whanau, tikanga and whakapapa, and another two are expected to select mostly Maori groups, and thus divert more rehabilitation resources to Maori.

A brief review of reasons for using imprisonment

  1. Any discussion of options for reducing inmate numbers should include consideration of what society expects to achieve by imprisonment, and the extent to which imprisonment of offenders meets those expectations.

  2. Imprisonment is society's 'ultimate sanction' and it is considered to have four socially desirable outcomes - deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution. Some of these are more relevant to modern justice policy than others.

    • Deterrence is based on the principle that the imprisoned person or other like-minded people will be deterred from similar actions in the future as a result of the possibility of imprisonment. The notion of deterrence hae a common-sense plausibility about

      However, the deterrent effect of imprisonment is difficult to demonstrate experimentally. A recent research paper from the Office of the Solicitor General of Canada brings together the results of 50 studies of the deterrent effect of imprisonment, which together involved more than 300,000 offenders.1 The study found that imprisonment, instead of a community sentence, did not reduce re-offending after release. It also found that longer prison sentences did not reduce re-offending, and may have increased it. The report noted:

      None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism. The recidivism rate for offenders who were imprisoned as opposed to given a community sanction were similar. In addition, Ionger prison sentences were not associated with reduced recidivism. In fact, the opposite was found. Longer sentences were associated with a 3% increase in recidivism...This finding suggests some support to the theory that prison may serve as a 'school for crime' for some offenders.

      Regardless of the type of analysis employed, no evidence for a crime deterrent function was found.

      A similar result has been reported for imprisonment of traffic offenders.2

  3. However, these findings do not exclude the possibility of a general deterrent effect - people who do not offend may be dissuaded from becoming offenders by the knowledge that imprisonment could result:

    • Rehabilitation. The second possible objective for the use of imprisonment is rehabilitation. In this case prison is used to confine the offender while programmes are provided that are expected to prevent further offending. The use of imprisonment solely for rehabilitation reasons is an expensive option and it cannot be justified on benefit/cost grounds unless community-based rehabilitation has failed.

    • Incapacitation. While an offender is confined to prison he or she cannot commit further offences against the public. Imprisonment solely for incapacitation is used in circumstances where there is clear evidence of dangerousness and high risk of persistent offending, so that the risks to public safety are judged to outweigh the rights of the offender. It is an option that is being used increasingly internationally as a means of managing high-risk violent offenders.

    • Retribution. Imprisonment for retribution holds that certain crimes require a clear response from society, regardless of any other merits or demerits of imprisonment - 'just deserts'. Crimes considered to be in this category include serious violent offences, serious sexual offences, and others. Where imprisonment is used primarily for retribution, the incidence of serious crimes will largely determine inmate numbers.

  4. Public opinion supports retribution, and can demand a lot of it - especially when encouraged by sensationalistic reporting of crime stories in the news media, and 'fear of crime' politics.


Footnotes:
1
Gendreau et al, 1999
2
See a series of papers by Yu, culminating in Yu, 2000
   

 
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