New Zealand Chief Justice Sian Elias has caused controversy after suggesting in a speech to the New Zealand Law Society that some prisoners be ordered free by the Government to help solve the problem of prison overcrowding and the safety and human rights concerns associated with it. Justice Minister Simon Power has told Elias to “stay out of government policy” and so-called victim support groups have expressed anger at her suggestions.
Unfortunately, the media has reported much less on the more important points in her speech, the main ones being that;

imprisonment does not reduce crime, that the criminal justice processes are largely irrelevant to crime reduction and that the causes of crime have to be directly addressed [and] must be communicated and understood.

Quoting former UK Chief Justice Lord Bingham, Elias notes that the average prisoner is male, of low intelligence, addicted to drugs, suffering from mental health problems and has a history of poverty, instability in the home and child abuse. Dealing with these issues would help prevent crime before it happens, rather than the ‘ambulance at the bottom of a cliff’ approach of building more prisons (or, as Corrections Minister Judith Collins is suggesting, putting prisoners in shipping containers). Early intervention with at-risk youth would have the added benefit of helping those who would otherwise end up rotting in jail cells become contributing members of society. Elias also cited a Canadian study which showed criminals given community based sentences had lower rates of re-offending than those incarcerated, and longer prison sentences appeared to cause more re-offending.

In the TV3 News coverage of the issue it was reported that political leaders said the ideas have merit, but would not say so publicly as doing so would be “political suicide”. How did New Zealand get into this situation? One where politicians see acknowledging the facts about crime and punishment to be a potentially career ending move? Well, TV3 News (as well as other media) can take a lot of the blame. Crime stories are cheap to produce, and creating fear in the public mind is a sure way to gain viewers. This saturation of crime reporting has created the impression that the country is in the middle of a crime wave, when in reality crime rates have only increased a small amount over the past decade (about 20 more crimes per 10,000 people compared to 1999). When the media shifts its focus from spectacle and sensationalism to investigation and critical analysis, maybe we can have a real debate.