Hon Russell Marshall
Chairperson, Robson Hanan Trust

Speech at Launch of Rethinking Crime and Punishment Website, Te Puni Kokiri, Wellington, on Tuesday, 9th November 2010

Embargoed until 5.00pm, Tuesday, 9th November 2010

Kia ora koutou.

It is my great pleasure, as Chairperson of the Robson Hanan Trust, to welcome you to this occasion, the launch of our new website. As I have worked the room, I have overheard a number of interesting conversations, including one or two speculating on the Trust’s name, and its origin.

After much deliberation, the Trustees agreed to name the Trust after the two great justice reformers of the last Century, John Robson and the Hon Ralph Hanan. We were delighted that the descendants of both men agreed to the move.

Of all the partnerships between public servants and politicians, there was none more potent or progressive, than that of John Robson, as the Secretary for Justice, and the Hon Ralph Hanan as Minster of Justice. Some refer to the period 1960 to 1970 as the “Golden Age of Justice Reform”. If that it so, it can be directly attributed to these two men.

They were a great combination. Ralph Hanan was a man of great compassion and intelligence. He opposed the death penalty, and crossed the floor in the vote for its abolition in 1961. Robson was an organised thinker with a wealth of new ideas. He made good use of criminologists and his own policy staff, and went on to be the founder lecturer at the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University.

Over that decade, Hanan and Robson introduced a raft of reforms in the area of justice and prison policy . Detention centres were established for young offenders, in an effort to take them out of the adult prison system. Borstal training was reduced from three to two years, in the belief that long terms of imprisonment were harmful to young men. In 1964, Witako (now Rimutaka) was established as a special treatment centre for adult first offenders, along with the country’s first fully fledged adult classification programme. In 1964, the first adult pre-release work hostel was opened in Christchurch.

In the same year, remission for good conduct was increased from one quarter of the sentence, to one third, and in 1965 they activated the first home leave scheme for prisoners. In 1963, the first juvenile Periodic Detention Centre was established, diverting young offenders and minor offenders away from prison - spending their weekends from Friday night to Sunday morning, engaged in community work. Not everything they tried worked, but they followed a formula which could well apply today. Don’t be frightened to experiment, but scientifically evaluate everything you do. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, close it down. It is a lesson that we could well learn today.

As responses to crime have heated up over recent decades, the patient and careful discovery of what works to prevent or reduce offending has faced a struggle to complete with more politically driven rhetoric and policy. Scientific method has come to be seen by its practitioners not only as a means of producing rational knowledge, but as a source of competing authority that can confound the ill-founded opinions on crime and its control that circulate in contemporary social and political life.

The Rethinking Crime and Punishment project was originally conceived in 2006 by Prison Fellowship New Zealand and the Salvation Army, as an effort to engage the public in informed debate about crime and punishment. It was an effort to discourage policies and strategies that were based on populist ideas that had no foundation in science, and were intended to appeal to the public support because of elements of punitiveness, rather than reduce reoffending. Four years have gone by, and the prison population has continued to increase - by 53.5% over the last ten years. In late 2009, the Board of Reference of the Rethinking Project met to decide whether to continue with the project, given that although the project we had made very little impact on public opinion, there was steadily growing support from people who were urging Kim Workman and his supporters to persist with the project. The Robson Hanan Trust, the next stage in the evolution of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment Project, was established as a charitable trust in March 2010, with a broader mandate to conduct or commission original research, implement innovative crime prevention projects, and most of all, engage in public education in issues of crime and punishment.

Shortly after the Trust was established, we conducted a literature review of public attitudes into crime and punishment. What we found was most encouraging. Firstly, research in countries comparable to New Zealand show that most people believe that prison is ineffective. The public want more and better alternatives to custody, and for the underlying causes of crime to be tackled.

Where there has nevertheless been an increase in punitive attitudes in recent years, often that attitude is abetted by a lack of information.

There is a clear link between public knowledge and public attitudes. In general the least informed members of the public tend to be the most critical. Public legal and criminological education [,] is an important part of any change strategy. Public attitudes to the sentencing of offenders become less punitive when people are provided with good information about options to imprisonment, and the full range of options and strategies. The Robson Hanan Trust aims to assist in the creation of better informed public opinion, thereby encouraging politicians to abandon the punitive approach that has been a central feature of government policies over recent years.

That public education role is what is intended for this new website. It will become the vehicle through which we will inform citizens, the mass media, practitioners, policy-makers and politicians alike about what works in reducing crime. In the process we hope to highlight the flaws in quick and dirty research or “off the cuff” responses to new situations. Instead we want to emphasise the value of high quality research and evaluation using the best possible methods.

We believe that crime and justice policy should be characterised by a pragmatic, empirical, humanistic concern to conduct and put to use research that can make the criminal justice system and prisons effective and decent. Over the next two years, we will make research and expert opinion available on a wide range of topics through the website, and encourage wider debate about what we have to do to create an effective criminal justice system. We believe that the pursuit of truth is the motor of social reform and progress.

Finally, we exist to ensure that the basic rights and protections afforded by the modern state are not carelessly disregarded. We will seek to address the growth of police powers, the hyperactive expansion of criminal offences, the spread of summary justice, and the bypassing of criminal justice protections and democratic processes.

We have set ourselves the task of tracking and critically dissecting these developments and their likely implications with a view to defending the traditions of criminal justice in a democratic state.

I want to thank you for coming today, and invite Kim Workman, our Executive Director, to talk about the website, how it will function, and how by December 2012, we aim to the “first port of call” for people seeking good information about the criminal justice system.

ENDS

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