Expected Demise of the Government

"If You Treat Us Nicely We Will Stop"

That did not take long.  The brand new Labour led New Zealand government has unsheathed a kukri knife and commenced the slow death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts.  Sometimes governments and elites risk become so enmeshed in their self-spun ideology that they depart from reality to another world.  And so, within a matter of months, it has come to pass in New Zealand.

The Minister of Justice is a fine fellow.  He has declared that the prison roll in New Zealand must be reduced.  This is to come about by a profoundly clever strategy.  He will shorten prison sentences, let more criminals out on bail, treat criminals nicely, and voila, crime will drop.  To naive, stupid Andrew Little, Minister of Justice the solution to overcrowded prisons is simple: treat people "kindly" and overnight they will become model citizens, who offend no more.  He has been encouraged to think along these lines by an (ostensible) chorus of elite academics who have assured him that his strategy will be a winner.

Minister of Justice Andrew Little has laid out a vision for criminal justice reform which sees sentencing law relaxed and a rejection of "tough on crime"-style politics.  His comments during an interview with the NZ Herald have been likened by one leading academic as the boldest political move in criminal justice since former Minister of Justice Ralph Hanan, who saw the death penalty abolished in 1961.

Little said "so-called law-and-order" policies have been a 30-year failure and locking up more people with longer sentences hasn't made New Zealand safer.  "New Zealand needs to completely change the way criminal justice works," he said. "It is a big challenge we are facing. It's not an issue that's been a short time in the making.  [NZ Herald]

We happen to live in a high crime area.  The folk are boiling mad at needless crime--needless insofar as New Zealand has a Grand Armee of programmes, welfare, and spending largesse for folk who are trying to make a go of things.  Despite this, burglary, housebreaking, car conversions, and thuggery are everywhere.  When people realize that the Minister of Justice is going to kiss and embrace all such folk and empty the prisons, and when they read the accounts of most of these ex-prisoners going on to commit more crime whilst they are out on bail, the anger against the government will eventually ensure that Labour will become a spent and exhausted political force.  It will be a deep self-inflicted wound.

He said the rapid rise in prison numbers "follows 30 years of public policy-making, public discourse, that says we need tougher sentences, need more sentencing, need people serving longer sentences and I think, frankly, criminalising more behaviour.  "One of the major challenges is to turn around public attitudes - to say that what we have been doing for the last 30 years in criminal justice reform actually isn't working. Our violent criminal offending is going up."

The comments follow an open letter from 32 leading academics in criminal justice calling on the Government to reject the building of a mega prison in Waikato designed to hold up to 3000 inmates. [Emphsis, ours]

Actually, the Minister of Justice has been misled.  Our violent criminal offending is now significantly lower than what it was in 2009, when it peaked.  Since that time the trend has been downward.  As one commentator put it:

There are two ways to reduce prison numbers – a very good way and a very bad way.  The very good way is to reduce offending and reoffending. Every Government tries to do this, and some programmes do work to reduce reoffending. However some criminals are recividist and nothing works.

The very bad way to reduce prison numbers is to simply let the recividist criminals out early so they can keep offending and bash and rape more New Zealanders. If that is your policy then it is very easy to reduce prison numbers.  [Kiwiblog]

It is also one of the most direct ways imaginable to become a loathed government.  The kukri knife has been unsheathed and the self-inflicted stabbing has begun.  It's likely that Minister Little will likely be largely responsible for Labour's eventual demise as a political party.

Even his political opponents concede that Andrew Little is a "nice bloke".   He is also naive.  Read the following quotation carefully.

Dropping the numbers of prisoners would symbolise a criminal justice system that was "more humane and more effective" because it targeted the causes of criminal offending "for those for whom those causes can actually be fixed".  "What a waste of taxpayer money, what a waste of human lives, when we know many of those people with a bit of effort and a bit of help addressing those underlying problems could actually be helped."  [Emphasis, ours.]

In other words, for most criminals, society is to blame.  We have made them into criminals and are responsible for what they have done.    It's not likely the community will find Little's naivete soothing when it has to bear the brunt of the muggings, the stabbings, and the abuses of the lawless preying upon the law-abiding.