Simon Power MP

National Party Justice & Corrections Spokesman

4 August 2007

Reducing crime, redeeming lives

Speech to National Party Annual Conference, Langham Hotel, Auckland.

How often do we hear people talk about “the failure of the criminal justice system”, or how, “the system isn’t working”?

It may surprise you to know that those very statements came from Helen Clark’s address to the Labour Party conference last year. It sounds like the kind of speech that would have gone down better at this conference.

Except that her diagnosis was based not on the increasing rates of crime, or the plight of victims, but on the fact that New Zealand has a high rate of imprisonment. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that the best way to cut the number of prisoners is to cut crime.

But that shouldn’t come as a surprise for a Government that has become the ‘caretaker’ of crime statistics, resigned to sweeping up the broken glass with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders.

Labour has run out of ideas.

In the justice portfolio, Helen Clark admitted last week that the Labour Government was getting its law reform ideas from the Law Commission, which is responsible for seven bills before the House, and another seven in the pipeline. The once-respected Ministry of Justice has been cut adrift, just like its Minister.

Meanwhile, the Government’s so-called ‘Crime Reduction Strategy’ is in tatters.

Treasury has slammed the strategy as having “no particular focus on stopping inter-generational crime or consideration of the role of early interventions in areas such as education, health, income support and housing”.

There is no plan. It’s been that way since 2001 and, despite plans to review it, nothing has emerged.

One of those priorities was supposed to be organised crime. But it took the drive-by shooting of Wanganui toddler Jhia Te Tua in May to stir the Government from its slumber.

They’ve promised an organised crime strategy by the end of the year, but the last paper the Minister of Justice received relating to gangs was entitled “A stocktake on what is known about organised crime”. That was in March 2005 - before the last election.

The problem is that the Labour Government is focused on managing the ‘outputs’ of the justice system, rather than dealing to crime.

After all, it’s much easier to count how many hours were spent on road patrol than it is to count the number of crimes that were prevented.

Because if they were serious about prevention, they would have targeted the source of so much criminal behaviour – the gangs.

Imagine how police officers in Wanganui must have felt when public outrage forced their masters to push their normal performance targets aside to allow them to actually crack down and round up the gang members in their town. They probably felt as if they had made a difference.

There is no doubt that if we want to deal to crime, we must deal to the gangs. For too long we have allowed gangs to be portrayed as unfortunate victims of societal problems - misfits thrown together by a world that rejects them. Poor babies.

When gang leaders go on TV and claim they are moving away from lives of crime, I say prove it. Throw away the patch.

Gangs, it seems, exist to plan and commit crime, and New Zealanders have had a gutsful.

National is looking at changing the criminal laws to:

• Nominate gang membership as a factor in sentencing.
• Strengthen the ability of the police to remove and storm gang fortifications.
• Make it easier for police to intercept gang communications.
• Strengthen the law that makes it an offence to be a member of a criminal organisation.

The key is to take the status, the money, and the power off the gangs.

It’s particularly worrying that gangs are seen as a lifestyle choice by some young people. If we want to see the future of crime, we need look no further than the boys with red or blue bandannas, seduced by the American gangster lifestyle. Becoming our own child soldiers.

We are now seeing a trend of increasing intensity in crimes committed by young offenders, even if the overall offence rate is fairly stable. Since 1999, violent youth crime has increased by an alarming 44%.

Some have proposed changes that could put 10-year-olds in adult courts and adult prisons, and wipe out the jurisdiction of the Youth Court. That seems to be far too blunt an instrument

We need the flexibility to deal appropriately with the full spectrum of young offenders, from isolated episodes of teenage rebellion to those who are already on the criminal career path.

Placing a young first-time offender into the adult criminal system would be like sending a hungry mind to an academy of crime. We have to make sure that’s not their only option. We have to show we are not devoid of compassion and ideas when there’s a chance to turn their lives around.

However, the increasing intensity of crimes being committed by young and old also points to wider societal problems.

At the risk of repeating myself, at this very conference last year I spoke of the gulf in values between those who have the capability to commit senseless acts of violence, and the vast majority of citizens who find it so utterly alien.

The shock we feel each time we are confronted with the news of yet another violent and degrading crime goes beyond disturbance over the details. We recoil because we cannot comprehend the mindset of someone who would do such a thing to another human being.

The increasing intensity of these crimes points to something missing in the development of the offender, and that is empathy. They often come from families who live on the fringes of our society, who don’t follow its shared rules and norms.

The case that brought these words back to mind recently is the alleged torture, and I can’t think of a better description than that, of Rotorua 3-year-old Nia Glassie

I don’t intend to rehearse the details of that horrific case. Hearing them once is enough to haunt me for a lifetime.

But neither can we stand by and simply brush it off as something that happens to someone else’s kids. They are all our responsibility.

We must send the message that such acts are obscene. That can start with a review of the Sentencing Act as it relates to crimes against children. The age of the victim should be more than just an aggravating factor at sentencing.

Assault on a child attracts a maximum sentence of two years, yet wilful ill-treatment of an animal gets a maximum of three years. Cruelty to a child attracts a maximum sentence of five years, yet an act of torture committed by a public official gets a maximum of fourteen years.

Our legislative priorities are wrong.

Letting hardened criminals out of prison earlier, as this Labour Government is proposing, simply increases the risk of more people falling victim to them.

Let me reiterate the comments of our leader, John Key, earlier this year: under National there will be no parole for New Zealand's worst repeat violent offenders.

There’s a pretty simple, two-word justification for this policy: Graeme Burton. In the past week it’s been reported that he’s still up to his old tricks in prison; yet another nail in the coffin for the Corrections Department.

On top of that, the department now charges the taxpayer $92,000 a year to keep a prisoner, compared to $58,000 in 2005

Any argument that running our prison system is a core responsibility of the state, and that private management of our prisons is inappropriate, has been completely undone by the performance of the Corrections Department in the past 18 months.

The bar has been lowered so far that a simple threshold for the decision to tender out the management of our prisons now exists: It is, ‘could private management of our prison system do a worse job?’

This is not an ideological question: I don’t care whether prisons are publicly or privately managed, as long as they work.

However, I would say that the last time prison management was tendered out, for Auckland Central Remand Prison, the department came fourth out of the four preferred tenderers.

One of the things National will want to do better is provide inmates with meaningful work.

While I was at Rangipo Prison last Tuesday, I spoke to inmates working on a forestry gang, pruning pines with a chainsaw. They told me that through work they could see a life beyond crime.

Turning these young men into workers with skills will also create positive changes for the families and communities in which they live. Yet we currently have a system where some prisoners are actually able to refuse to work.

Some of the opportunities for inmates are actually better than those available to their victims.

According to the latest Crime and Safety Survey, the people who are most likely to be the victims of crime are those on low incomes, living in deprived areas, who are young, and/or Maori.

Getting tough on gangs, youth offenders, and child abuse means giving those people a better chance of avoiding becoming another victim, and the opportunity to build a better future for themselves.

And that also means showing a stronger commitment to victims’ rights than we have witnessed from the Labour Government in the past month.

Labour’s recent legislation to cut the prison population by letting more inmates out of jail actually tried to take rights away from victims. It succeeded in extending the right of inmates to seek compensation for a further three years, and victims must re-live the crime if they want to claim any of it.

And if it was left up to the Labour Government, victims would have lost the right to appear before the Parole Board at their own request.

Clearly, Labour’s priority is with offenders, not victims.

Every now and then a political party has an opportunity to do something in an area of policy just because it is right.

We have to make a decision as to whether we too will become the caretakers of crime statistics, or whether we take the opportunity to seriously reduce crime, redeem the lives of young offenders, and recognise the needs of victims.

National has made that decision.

Ends

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