Hard News: Perception and reality in the criminal justice system
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It always seems to me that those with the most to say, on these matters, are those who have not sat in Court and listened to the facts presented
Well it is easier -
Russell Brown, in reply to
Just in: Contains crime policy, public perception, online poll, McVicar
Awesome self-selected poll amongst the readers of New Zealand's angriest online forums. Still, excellent timing for us. Thanks for the heads-up.
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I wonder what Hubbard will get, if convicted. I bet he'll do less than two years - for (allegedly) stealing the best part of $500 from everyone in NZ.
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So, essentially, the thing that reversed the steady rise in the proportion of offenders being sentenced to imprisonment was the introduction of home and community detention and intensive supervision for the least serious offences.
Without going into too much detail, I've been indirectly involved in aspects of the the home detention process (in my professional role, not as a participant) and I can honestly say it's no picnic. There is a shitload of monitoring that occurs 24 hours a day, and it's often hit or miss whether someone will be successful in even being allowed on home detention. Most people who criticise home d as soft have never seriously thought about how draining it is to have your movements restricted so completely (though ironically, those same people usually belong to the "OMG government is Big Brother!" crowd.)
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And there's always the chance to be knighted selling beer
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Hilary Stace, in reply to
Illustrates how stupid the drug laws are. He's no criminal. Just a gentle 62 year old who been entertaining with his music for four decades. What possible purpose does this conviction serve for anyone?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Illustrates how stupid the drug laws are. He’s no criminal. Just a gentle 62 year old who been entertaining with his music for four decades. What possible purpose does this conviction serve for anyone?
I actually know a couple of people who used to buy pot from Rick, both of them about my age. They appreciated having somewhere safe, discreet and friendly to go.
Rick being busted has not, of course, stopped them being pot smokers. And all this guff about whether Rick has, in the judge's view, "rehabilitated" or not is absurd. He's a 62 year-old musician who smokes pot. What exactly is he rehabilitating from?
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Meanwhile in the US people are committing crimes for healthcare. Way of the future?
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
...for (allegedly) stealing the best part of $500 from everyone in NZ.
I don't think any of these charges
relate to the collapse and bail out
of South Canterbury Finance...
That's a whole other kettle of fish
- and I would hope some of the blame
may be shared around on that one. -
Could someone please frame McVicar so that he gets to spend a little time actually inside Club Mt Eden?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
And isn’t it ironic the private prison system has brought us ’Mt Eden Club Med’? The Two Minutes Hate brigade will never be happy.
From that story:
The 10-year contract, which the company says is valued at about $300 million, includes a clause that says the contractor must "ensure meals conform to each prisoner's religious, ethnic, cultural and medical requirements".
A fuming McVicar said last night: "That is disgraceful. A prison is a prison – you have broken the law and I don't think we have to tie the contractor in knots about having to conform with cultural requirements.
"Prison has to be humane, but I don't think we should be bending over to cater for every cultural or religious belief."
Good grief. Is he proposing force-feeding beef to Hindus and pork to Muslims and Jews?
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Nope, equal opportunity bread & water for everyone.
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Hey, David Garrett was SST, wasn't he? And McVicar knew about his past, so isn't he an accessory after the fact? How come he wasn't charged?
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Hilary Stace, in reply to
Yes, even for the coeliacs.
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Speaking of "accessories after the fact"
Key is now telling Australian media that
Pike River Mine would be illegal in Australia
even though "In November last year, however, he said: "I have no reason to believe that New Zealand safety standards are any less than Australia's."
I think the crucial phrase there is
- I have no reason... something that becomes more and more obvious every day! -
Marcus Turner, in reply to
I have some half-formed smartass reply in the back of my brain about coeliacs, culture and yoghurt.....
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Somewhere in this public perception of more prison for offenders is an assumption that prison sentences will change these offenders for the better. Or at least make them too scared to offend again. It is clearly just not true. Prison is a brutalizing place that institutionalizes people. It’s place that at its worst, breaks people or at least knocks the humanity out of them. They come out – oh yes everyone seems to forget they will come out one day – they come out fucked up and angry. They come out with less social skills than they went in with. Prisons simply create the next wave of offenders. It is such a dumb idea.
Punishment seems so embedded in our approach to many things but we have known for years now that it has very limited efficacy. Why are we still so wedded to punishment?
What ever happened to the Roper Report (1987) I can’t find a copy of it but from memory at the time it was suggesting a whole new approach to prisons, moving away from the punitive to the trans-formative, using prisons to change people. -
He’d have been much safer opening a bar, basically.
Rick Bryant is a fine man who would have been much safer leaving New Zealand.
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recordari, in reply to
What ever happened to the Roper Report (1987) I can’t find a copy of it but from memory at the time it was suggesting a whole new approach to prisons, moving away from the punitive to the trans-formative, using prisons to change people.
Interesting question. It is referenced extensively here.
This quote seemed interesting, in the context of the ‘pro-arrest’ policy.
Overseas studies have shown for example, that neither treatment alone nor punishment alone, is very effective in reducing family violence. A combination is. The offender needs to know that his apprehension will be sure and swift. Victims have to be similarly assured. Under the current legislation, the practices of the Police, the ignorance of the public, and the unwillingness of helpers to invade the sanctity of the family, these results are by no means certain. Our recommendations, therefore, attempt to address the issue by urging that existing legislation is utilised to its fullest extent and that new legislation, public education and practices are introduced to make families safer (Roper Report 1987:101).
With a lay persons view of the subsequent 24 years, I’d say government bodies, including the police, adopted the arrest part wholeheartedly, but have continued to fail spectacularly on the ‘treatment’ side.
Pita Sharples pet project Whare Oranga Ake tries to address some of this.
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I have to agree with most of your points apart from the social skills, there used to be toastmasters and debating and yoga.1998 Newspaper Clippings
Crack-downs in prisons can only breed violence
...In competition with outsiders inmates excelled, particularly in sport and debating. Hardly a year went by when the Paremoremo team did not reach the final of one of the Auckland Debating Association's annual contests. At least five times the prison was victorious.
from ADA sitebut I think there may have been some positive outcomes so have been discontinued.
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For completeness: Workman to McVicar, which mentions a rather dry Andrew Becroft paper which I’d only heard of recently: How To Turn A Child Offender Into An Adult Criminal – In 10 Easy Steps.
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One of the many things to learn about on my list is Finland.
The reason is that culturally, Finns aren't that far away from us. They have a tiny population in a big country, they're heavy drinkers, they have the same dark streak, the same high suicide rate, several ethnic minorities including an indigenous one...
The Finns started out with the Imperial Russian penal code, which as you would expect was extremely harsh. McVicar would have loved it. They now have a very progressive penal code of the sort that would make McVicar have a meltdown, with a low recidivism rate. What I DON'T know or understand is how they got there. There is an obvious appeal to the emotion in a punitive code, and I'm interested in what public debate led to a less punitive one. I feel it could be helpful to know this in trying to change policy here.
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Incidentally, it's partly just me being lazy, but has anyone sighted the actual Becroft letter about youth justice that Key tabled? I can't shake the idea comments on different bits of the system are being confused in the reporting I saw.
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Until the First World War, Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Crime and punishment in Finland were governed by the tough Russian justice system, a system the Finns inherited after independence. The break with Russia at the end of the First World War was followed by a terrible civil war, political unrest, and then two wars with the U.S.S.R. After 1945, peace returned, but Finland was firmly fixed within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.
This violent history hardened Finnish attitudes toward crime and punishment. Long prison sentences in austere conditions were standard. In the 1950s, Finland's incarceration rate was 200 prisoners per 100,000 people -- a normal rate for East Bloc countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia where justice systems had been Sovietized, but four times the rate in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the 1960s, Finland began edging cautiously toward reform, using its Scandinavian neighbors as models. Nils Christie, a renowned Norwegian criminologist, recalls speaking to Finnish judges and criminologists in Helsinki in 1968. At the time, Mr. Christie and others were developing the first international comparisons of prison populations, so he was the first to tell the Finns that their incarceration rate was totally unlike that of their Scandinavian neighbors and was "really in the Russian tradition." The audience was shocked, Mr Christie recalls in an interview in Ottawa, "and some of them then decided this was not a very good policy." Discussions and debates were widespread. Ultimately, says Tapio Lappi-Seppala, the director of the Finnish National Research Institute of Legal Policy, an agreement was reached that "our position was a kind of disgrace."
During the next two decades, a long series of policy changes were implemented, all united by one goal: to reduce imprisonment, either by diverting offenders to other forms of punishment or by reducing the time served in prison. "It was a long-term and consistent policy," Mr. Lappi-Seppala emphasizes. "It was not just one or two law reforms. It was a coherent approach." The reforms began in earnest in the late 1960s and continued into the 1990s. In 1971, the laws allowing repeat criminals to be held indefinitely were changed to apply only to dangerous, violent offenders. The use of conditional sentences (in which offenders avoid prison if they obey certain conditions) was greatly expanded. Community service was introduced. Prisoners may be considered for parole after serving just 14 days; even those who violate parole and are returned to prison are eligible for parole again after one month. And for those who aren't paroled, there is early release: All first- time offenders are let out after serving just half their sentences, while other prisoners serve two- thirds. Mediation was also implemented, allowing willing victims and offenders to discuss if the offender can somehow set things right. "It does not replace a prison sentence," says Mr. Lappi- Seppala, but "in minor crimes, you may escape prosecution or you may get a reduction in your sentence." There are now 5,000 cases of mediation per year, almost equal to the number of imprisonments.
Juvenile justice was also liberalized. Criminals aged 15 to 21 can only be imprisoned for extraordinary reasons -- and even then, they are released after serving just one-third of their time. Children under the age of 15 cannot be charged with a crime. The most serious crimes can still be punished with life sentences but these are now routinely commuted, and the prisoner released, as early as 10 years into the sentence and no longer than 15 or 16 years. The Finns retain a power similar to Canada's "dangerous offender" law: persons found to be repeat, serious, violent offenders with a high likelihood of committing new violent crimes can be held until they are determined to no longer be a threat to the public. There are now 80 such offenders in prison and they, like Canada's dangerous offenders, are unlikely to ever be released. One especially critical change was the creation of sentencing guidelines that set shorter norms. Similar guidelines are used in the United States, but many of those restrict judges' discretion -- Finnish judges remain free to sentence outside the norm if they feel that is appropriate. These guidelines were also the product of extensive discussions among judges and other officials in the justice system, unlike American guidelines which were, in most cases, simply imposed on judges by politicians.
THE ABSENCE OF DIRECT POLITICAL control was critical to the Finnish transformation. Despite the enormous changes in Finnish criminal justice, crime has never been a political issue. "None of the major parties took this on their agenda," says Mr. Lappi-Seppala. That's still true today. Even Finnish victims of crime seem to be satisfied with that approach. Victims' organizations act as support groups, not political lobbies, says Markku Salminen, the head of prisons. "You don't mix politics with this. There are so many feelings," he says. "It's a tradition."
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andrew r, in reply to
Rick being busted has not, of course, stopped them being pot smokers. And all this guff about whether Rick has, in the judge's view, "rehabilitated" or not is absurd. He's a 62 year-old musician who smokes pot. What exactly is he rehabilitating from?
A lot of that is Defence lawyer speak. On the books cannabis is illegal, in attempt to persuade the sentencing Justice to give Home D which Bryant was right on the cusp of potentially getting, one has to show the Sentencer that assn with said illegal substance is diminishing, - kinda standard. I would say the sole reason he did not recieve Home D were his previous cannabis convictions, in particular his conviction for previously supplying cannabis - In many respects the Justice's hands were tied by relevant case law precedent. There is a massive difference in terms of sentencing direction between using cannabis,and whoooah ..dealing cannabis .
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