Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill
Hone Harawira, Maori Party Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau
Tuesday 4 May 2010; 4.35pm

When we want to look at prison stats and prison programmes, at programmes that work and programmes that do not, we do not have to look any further than the good ole USA, where dingbat sheriffs think they’re clever marching prisoners around in pink uniforms, and idiots sign laws allowing police to arrest and jail anyone who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant – people like Parekura Horomia and Mita Ririnui sitting over there.

It is also where Governor, Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger, oversees a California state penal system facing a crisis of overcrowding with more than 167,000 inmates, often triple-bunked, angry, fearful, and exploding into violence across our screens every week on America’s Hardest Prisons; a penal system that for the state of California alone costs 8 billion dollars – 11% of the state budget – and blowing out of control as we speak.

Now Arnie might be a muscle freak but he does not get to be governor of one of the world’s top ten economies without having some smarts, and it occurred to him that there had to be a better way to deal with prisoners than the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key philosophy that the three-strikes morons of the overseas and domestic variety would use to deal with crime.

So he proposed a simple solution – dividing criminals into two categories: those who pose little or no risk and those who need regular supervision and taking all the less threatening ones out of jail and putting them into other programmes. A simple solution, but a seismic-shift reform that has long been sought by independent analysts and commissions into penal reform.

That brings us back here to Aotearoa, where, instead of trying to learn from the mistakes of the Californian penal system, we seem hell-bent on simply following them down the deep dark hole that Arnie is struggling to get out of.

And folks, this Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill is scary because it even ignores the advice of the Attorney General that the "three strikes and you're out" law could be in breach of our fundamental human rights, in particular the section in the Bill of Rights protecting New Zealanders against cruel, degrading or "disproportionately severe" punishment, such as having to face a sentence of life for unlawfully discharging a firearm which is a common occurrence at Tuhoe and Ngapuhi tangihanga – and Tuhoe Treaty settlements for that matter. It could involve unlawfully discharging a firearm in the use of granddad’s rifle when one is out hunting, having never ever thought to get registered.

Experts like Professor John Pratt, Professor of Criminology at Victoria University will tell us what I told the house last week about a similar kick-them-when-they’re-down bill, which is that without a sound philosophical base, penal measures are nothing more than the nasty, vicious form of vengeance that we thought had died out in Europe before Pakeha came here.

And just five years ago a Cabinet Paper titled Effective Interventions concluded that: “there are smarter ways than prison to prevent crime and make criminals accountable to their victims and society. Prison is not the most effective or efficient approach to reducing crime.”

That same paper also noted how even remand in custody was being influenced by growing public, political and media pressure for change. In fact, in the ten years from 1997 to 2007, prison sentences went up by 37%, but remand into custody went up by 214%.

All that of course, saw the Corrections budget blow out to $900 million for 2007/08, and if we carry on the way we’re going, two billion dollars by 2020. The silly thing is that this mania about building more and more prisons and filling them even before they are built, at a cost that country just can’t sustain, is not only illogical, it’s also unnecessary.

International research out of Washington confirms that there are excellent alternatives to prison which not only reduce the demand for prison beds but also reduce crime, programmes like Group-Care, education, and counselling.

The problem is though, that while all our resources are being siphoned off into building prisons, doubling up the bunks in cells, and locking inmates down for 16 hours to cope with overcrowding, the positive programmes for prisoner rehabilitation like work, training and education are being closed off, and we can’t even provide for 500 drug rehab places a year in a system with 6,500 prisoners who are currently drug or alcohol dependent.

International evidence tells us that three strikes: has led to a massive increase in prison populations, and jailhouse homicides. It has had a major negative impact on non-violent offenders and their families and on poor communities. It has resulted in a blow-out in costs for society - and the problem is getting worse.

The evidence also shows that imprisonment does not deter crime, and that harsher prison conditions and longer sentences do not reduce re-offending. The evidence shows that reductions in crime usually come about through better drug and alcohol programmes, greater employment and education opportunities, and stronger families and stronger communities.

For the last few years we have seen a ‘build them and we will fill them’ philosophy in terms of our prisons, to the point where prisons targeted to be completed in 2011 are already filled in 2010, before they have even been finished being built.

That philosophy will be exacerbated by the ‘three strikes and you’re out rule’ because it means that we will be locking them up in rugby clubs and moving them around the country in buses at night time because there are no other beds for them to sleep in. We will be filling up the day rooms at police stations. We will run out of places to put people in jail.

We will simply not be able to sustain that because at the end of the day we either lock them up for life – and we pay for it for life; we pay for it through the nose for life – or they will get out. And when they get out, they will be seriously upset people.

They will take it out on a whole lot of other people. There is no rehabilitation going on in this proposal. There is no intent to use the opportunity to change the nature of some of these people. I hear people asking how many chances they need. They do not even need one chance. But it is about giving them the right chance the first time.

The threat of heavier and heavier punishment does not change people. All it does is piss them off. It makes them angrier so when they come out, they will be worse than when they went it. We have to try to turn this around; the bash ‘em and bash ‘em again philosophy has been proven not to work overseas.

We would be foolish to go down that track If the evidence was different, I would say to give it a try. But the evidence is not different. It suggests that the best opportunity to turn people around is to try to get to them, before they get in prison and improve their lot, to address the causes of crime, rather than the effects of crime, and to attack poverty in the home.

Whanau Ora provides the opportunity for Maori on this side of the House, and on that side of the House, to put our hands up and say that we think we can do better, and then to challenge ourselves to do better, so we do not need draconian legislation like this.

This which will simply take our country backwards into a time where vengeance and nasty, mean-spirited viciousness was the kind of punishment meted out on people in 16th century, England.

Koina no mo tenei wa. Thank you very much. Kia ora tatou katoa.

ENDS

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