A sweeping 2013 law change designed to create greater bail hurdles for violent offenders has had an outsize effect on women, and Maori women in particular. Continue reading

A new report from justice hui representatives is resolute in its calls for total reform of the justice system, once and for all. Read more

Peter Dunne says that for at least the last 30 years it has been virtually impossible to have a rational political debate about law and order.

And he says that, without decisive political leadership, the fallacy of building more prisons to keep people safe while crime continues to fall will remain the default position.

In his weekly political column on Newsroom, Dunne points out that since 1990 New Zealand's population has increased by 46 percent.

At the same time, the prison population has grown by 129 percent.

And the overall crime rate has been declining steadily since the 1980s.

"That leaves us in the perverse situation of fewer crimes, including violent crimes, being committed; but more and more people ending up in prison," Dunne says.

He says the focus has to be singleminded - ensuring fewer people are sent to prison, and that our internationally very high imprisonment rate is steadily reduced.

Dunne has some suggestions about what should be done - including:

• Making greater use of bail and home detention for remand prisoners
• Looking at the types of crime for which people are being imprisoned, and whether there are better alternatives
• Looking at the sentencing options currently available to the Courts
• Seeing if judges should have more flexibility
• Getting rid of "frankly silly populist and unsuccessful measures" like the "three strikes" law
• Looking more seriously at marae-based justice and sentencing for Maori offenders

Dunn concedes it is comparatively easy to state what needs to be done.

He knows it will harder to make it happen.

The public flashpoint on law and order issues is extremely sensitive.

Source

• newsroom.co.nz
• Image: corrections.govt.nz

The report, released at the Nga Hau E Wha National marae on Wednesday, looked at how those aged between 10 and 16 are faring when they fall foul of the law.

Part of an annual project, the National Youth Custody Index, the report uses the Official Information Act to compile a snapshot of how well the justice system is doing in dealing with young people.

The research relies on responses from government departments and the police to Official Information Act requests.

It has been carried out for the past four years and most organisations have been forthcoming with the requested information.

The report found the number of children charged in court increased by 6 percent last year, compared to the year before.

While the number of young European people in court was down 1 percent, there has been a 9 percent rise for Maori over the 12 months.

The students also have uncovered the practice of keeping youth in police cells, and the disproportionate number of Maori youth before the courts.

Becroft, who attended the launch of the report, has described the state of youth detention in New Zealand "a crisis".

"The formalised option of remand to an adult police cell, which will always be kept separate and in solitary confinement, sometimes with the light on for 24 hours, poor sanitation - that option is simply unacceptable."

Also of particular concern to St Thomas College students was the rising number of Maori teenagers passing through the courts.

"It's been rising over the last 10 years, and it keeps rising. Last year it rose nine per cent, and now it's sitting at about 64 per cent," St Thomas student Te Aotahi Rice-Edwards said.

Source

• tvnz.co.nz
• radionnz.co.nz
• Image: screenshot tvnz.co.nz

On the fourth is a dining hall, behind that the meeting areas and offices. The perimeter fence is lined with coils of barbed wire, over which fantails dart back and forth, pecking at the grass.

Here, however, pou whenua (traditional posts) which have been carved by inmates, rise from the ground along with the ageing basketball hoop.

Visitors pass through not just the sliding grey security fence, but also the ornate gateway, or waharoa.

For the prisoners, the experience is untypical too, with just about every part of the rehabilitative program underpinned by Maori principles, or tikanga Maori.

Te Ao Marama (World of Light) is one of five units around the country that make up the Te Tirohanga, or Focus, program.

Together they represent a small attempt to tackle a huge problem: the alarmingly disproportionate quotient of indigenous people locked up in New Zealand prisons.

With 8,500 prisoners among a national population of 4.5 million, New Zealand ranks as one of the highest jailers in the developed world. But as has been repeatedly highlighted in reports by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Maori component is staggering.

While those who identify as Maori make up about 15% of the New Zealand population, the corresponding figure behind bars is more than 50%.

Among women, for whom there is no Te Tirohanga option, it is higher still, at 60%.

The most recent data suggests more than six of every 10 Maori prisoners will be back inside within 48 months.

At its core, the rehabilitation-focused approach of Te Tirohanga is an attempt to interrupt the tendency for jails to act as recruitment centres for gangs and incubators for further criminality. Continue reading

Sources

• Toby Manhire is a former editor of the Guardian comment pages, and the article above was published in The Guardian.
• Image: For the Sake of the Gospel

I follow his case with interest. Nobody who was at university at the same time as Rick could forget him, in part because he was a top English literature student, in part because of his vocals in local bands, and partly because he was there in the great late 60s rush into dope, which back then was a novelty.

I'm not breaking confidence here, since Rick has admitted to a long-standing use of cannabis.

He has now been jailed twice for drug crimes, has 14 previous drug convictions, and is three months into a two-year sentence for having cannabis to sell, along with having small amounts of cannabis oil, ecstasy and cocaine at his place.

My point is not about him in particular - I'm sorry to see he's in this position - but about the attitudes among middle-class people of that era that surface when they run into difficulties with the police.

They adopt a posture that's part aristocratic disdain, and part disbelief: police exist to hassle other people, surely, not people who've read Dostoevsky and know how to hold a knife and fork. You get this, too, with fraudsters who are suddenly called to account, and with bad drivers.

Perhaps it was this instinctive understanding that made ACT leader Don Brash, keen to slash Government spending, moot legalising cannabis and making dope-dealing OK.

That might be the one politically appealing idea Brash will ever come up with that could attract old stoners, though unfortunately they're the last people who would vote for him.

Rick wants home detention, and who can blame him? He has a music room at home, and creature comforts, and could easily pretend the whole darn court thing had never happened. Prison is not a nice place: he knew that already: its unpleasantness is meant to be its point.

But his arguments could only have been dreamed up by a white middle-class offender who'd woken from a bad dream only to discover he was living it.

No Maori, let's say, the 12 per cent of the population who make up half this country's prison population, would dream of appealing on the grounds - among other things - of not belonging there because you don't get enough sunshine, and you don't like air conditioning.

What made me think about this is Hone Harawira, who snarled about the appalling Maori rate of imprisonment on TV7 the other night. I wonder how successful Maori are at getting home detention.

Harawira is hard to take, but often right.

Read the full article

• Source: Rosemary McLeod in The Press
• Image: topnews.net.nz