Sensible sentencing is neither sensible nor effective
4th April 2009

The visit to Ashburton last week of Garth McVicar, founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, throws a spotlight on the work of that organisation. After nine years in business the Trust is enjoying success. Its message fits closely with conservative voters and reflects the policies of the new government.

McVicar mines a deep vein of support with appeals for tougher sentencing laws, stricter bail conditions and restricted parole. He expresses the frustration felt by many in the face of increasing violence. His desire to revive what he believes were the prominent values of 30 years ago is particularly popular with the middle-aged and older.

The Trust’s vision is to create A Safe New Zealand. Its “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” methods, however, do nothing to achieve this goal.

The vengeful desire to stuff more people into prisons and to keep them there for longer may be a natural response to violent crime. If a person takes a life why shouldn’t they serve the term of their life in retribution? Surely this will deter future offenders?

But there is a problem with this approach.

It doesn’t work.

McVicar says we should look at the example of other countries and ‘get tougher’ but the evidence points strongly to the failure of tougher sentencing laws. The United States has pursued the path of getting tough on crime for years, with disastrous results. Today, the United States locks up 750 out of every 100,000 of its citizens, compared to 197 in New Zealand and far fewer in most other countries, and yet America is awash with violent crime.

People who commit violent crime are not deterred by tougher sentences. The murderer does not stop to reflect on whether the penalty is likely to be 10 years or 20.

Prisons are schools for criminal behaviour. Putting more people into prisons and keeping them there for longer feeds the sub-culture and drives it deeper into the families and communities of the convicted.

McVicar is right in saying we have to learn from our history, he just draws the wrong lessons. We will not build a safer future by recalling a more punitive past, but by addressing the real roots of violent crime, which lie in the social and economic directions we have chosen to take New Zealand in the past 30 years.

Growing inequality is the foundation of lawlessness. We have succeeded in creating a permanent group of poor at the bottom of our society and we treat them with a level of disdain not seen since Victorian times. Child poverty, abuse, ignorance and poor health are not accidental. They are the natural outcomes of deliberate policies, like this week’s tax cuts which effectively redistribute money from low income earners to the wealthiest.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s ideas are not only wrong, they are also expensive. Building more prisons is the least cost-effective approach to reducing crime. Research in many parts of the world proves that relatively small sums of money spent on identifying children at risk of criminal behaviour and intervening to support those children and their families has much greater value.

In America, recent research by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy was so effective in demonstrating that every dollar spent to support young children at risk saved the taxpayers 3 dollars in the criminal justice system that the state legislature scrapped plans to build a new prison and diverted the money into parenting and youth programmes.

The real solutions to our problems are less attractive than the simple appeal to vengeance of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. They are slow and incremental and they work from the ground up. They require us to confront greed and self-interest. But they are, ultimately, the only sensible solutions.