I am cautiously optimistic at today’s announcement that the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill a.k.a. the “Three Strikes Bill” will be moving forward as part of the government’s legislative program. In my post Three Strikes: Proportion and Protection, which was published in the New Zealand Law Students Association publication LEX, I argued that the “apparent inconsistency” identified by the Attorney General, per his statutory obligation under section 7 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act on the basis that the Bill affronts the proportionality doctrine, was able to be argued around on the basis that criticisms of the Bill along these lines confuse appropriate force for punishment with defensive force.
Given this, provided the select committee does a good job on assessing submission and making recommendations and parliament carefully considers these we have the potential to finally have much tougher sentences on recidivist offenders of heinous and violent crimes. Regular readers will remember that, as documented in The Deal is Signed: New Zealand Has a New Government, part of the confidence and supply agreement that the National Party made with the ACT Party back in November 08 following New Zealand’s last general election was that National agree to introduce ACT’s “Three Strikes Bill” and support it to Select Committee, so this news was fairly inevitable.
RELATED POSTS:
Three Strikes: Proportion and Protection
Published – Three Strikes: Proportion and Protection
The Deal is Signed: New Zealand Has a New Government
Tags: Justice · Public Policy · Punishment · Three Strikes Bill2 Comments
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I have not read the Bill and accept that I am therefor speaking from a point of ignorance with respect to that in particular.
However, I am a criminal barrister and have a more than passing understanding of and aquaintance with the criminal system within NZ.
My points are few and I will not try to expand on them greatly. Further, they are not meant as an argument for or against the Bill, merely as thinking points.
1.Prisons are extremely unpleasant places. I have been in a few and I suggest that in general no matter how much you hear the suggestion that they are some kind of holiday farm for criminals it is vastly preferable to be outside them than inside them.
2. It is easy to make people act like animals. All you have to to is put them with animals and treat them like animals. Prisons are a good place to train people with criminal convictions (and there are ALOT of you out there) to become harder and to become better criminals.
3. To teach people you put them with more experienced people that have the time and inclination to pass on their experience and knowledge. Universities and schools are good examples of this. Prisons are also.
4. As it turns out the majority of Judges are really quite intelligent, have a decent amount of experience with the law and know a butt load more about the type, number and quality of crimes than some people who complain about how awful it has all become (this is phrased as an empirical claim and,strictly speaking, it should not be. However, I cannot think of a better way of phrasing it immediately. Please accept then that it is an expression of my intuition and my experience of the Judiciary of some of the people that have complained to me about crime levels and sentencing in the past and I am not able to point to empirical evidence to support it). If they send people to jail they usually think that there is a good reason for doing so. If they do not, they usually think there is a good reason for that as well (for the avoidance of doubt I am indulging in mild understatement for effect … or, at least, that is what I am aiming for :-))
Sending people to jail is an easy and politically attractive answer to dealing with crime but does little or nothing to actually stop it. Eventually people get out and they and, in the long run, society may be worse off for it. But it is easier to point to the the result of x more people sent to jail than spend money in schools and with CYFS etc., which do not generate quick and easy statistics to impress voters with.
I would suggest that despite the fact that we still have drink drivers and that it is probably hard to quantify the effect that about 30 years of anti-drink driving advertising has had very few of us would suggest that long (generations long) campaign has been a waste of money or should be stopped. The kinds of work that needs to be done to curb crime will similarly take generations and will not create quick and easy statistics.
Prisons are necessary but in my passing opinion, they are not as necessary as some politicians or lobbyists would have us think.
I was in California when they passed a 3-strikes law.
Since then, the prison population has exploded, the COSTS of prison have exploded, and judges have been forced to put people in jail for life for minor offenses which happen, because of bad laws, to be felonies.
Life in prison for sniffing cocaine, that sort of thing.
Almost everyone in California agrees that the “3-strikes” law is a disaster.
You won’t like it.
.-= My last blog-post ..It’s not justice =-.