It takes political courage to contradict the prevailing nostrums of the day, and National’s deputy prime minister and Finance Minister, Bill English, is to be commended for doing just this.
Opening a Families Commission’s 50 Key Thinkers forum in May, Mr English referred to prisons as a moral and fiscal failure. In so doing he burst the hot-air cloud of rhetoric and emotion that so often envelops discussions of crime and punishment in this country – and which runs contrary to what much evidence and research reveals about it.