Public Issues, Methodist Church

Media Release, 30 October 2016

Turn the tables for Prison expansion – Invest for Decarceration

Investment in 1800 new prison beds at a cost of $2.5 billion goes against the grain of Bill English’s Social Investment policies and the mantra of no new money for social spending.

Decarceration would make sense for a Social Investment approach. It would be investment for preventing imprisonment by turning around deprivation and poverty and domestic violence – the risk factors that lead to offending and imprisonment.

Why has the investment lens not been applied to rehabilitation and prison policy? Better still, to education and training for vocational opportunities and attention to the early part of the pipeline to prison. Reoffending is not reducing - despite the Better Public Service Target of reducing reoffending by 25% by 2017.

In the world of criminal justice, vulnerable children in state care are one of the groups that feed into the pipeline of the criminal justice system. The policy planning papers for the Ministry for Vulnerable Children explicitly refer to the need for a system-level response for vulnerable children and their families, with youth justice services to prevent reoffending and live crime free lives.

A model for decarceration could also take a pipeline approach to crime and justice by starting with investment in children, families and whanau. At the criminal justice end, a framework of a ‘social harm’ would be a new model for policy. Social harm acknowledges all parties in the crime and works with processes of restitution to achieve restoration.

Rather than the criminal-offender-punishment model, a social harm paradigm starts with removing conditions of deprivation which lead to prison – where the dependency, anti-social attitudes and crime are reproduced.

The announcement of a $2.5 billion investment in incarceration was justified by Minister Collins as an intervention for getting tough on methamphetamine. Yet 50% of crime is associated with family violence and this is closely linked to reoffending, with risk amplified by drug-abuse.

Eighteen hundred new beds will accommodate 900 Māori – on the basis of the 50% incarceration rates of Māori. The recent exposé of UN Committee on the Rights of the Child published in the in the Guardian, refers to the entrenched disparities for Māori and Pasifika children, with failure to address poverty and access to services systematically in New Zealand. The $2.5 billion could go to Whanau Ora, or to Māori housing or housing for Pasifika communities.

In 2015 reoffending reductions did not meet the targets. Neither prison nor more police will meet the social investment criteria of long term independence because of intransigent recidivism and the punitive orientation of incarceration.

Social Investment is open to interpretation, and is widely understood to put a premium on actuarial interests. However the Treasury definition, and the new Ministry for Vulnerable Children purposes could both be interpreted as investing in prevention and wellbeing. Quoting Treasury: ‘Social Investment is about improving the lives of New Zealanders and using information to understand the people who need public services to inform investment decisions. Early investment is to achieve better long term results and helping them to become independent’.

The central purpose of the new Ministry for Vulnerable Children is ‘all children and young people grow up in loving and stable families and communities where they can be safe, strong, connected and able to flourish’. It is to be a child-centred system with an investment approach’.

The diversion of $2.5 billion from prison to prevention could stack up if funds were going to education and skills rprogrammes, or even Drug Treatment Units, one of the more successful rehabilitation programmes. Perhaps 1800 new beds is part of social housing policy? A $2.5 billion investment there would make sense, as it would for implementing a minimum of 10% reduction in child poverty.

Prison policy needs to be part of a whole of system approach to people at risk. Investing in wellbeing and tackling the risk factors in the criminal justice pipeline has a higher chance of achieving healthy social integration for all New Zealanders.

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