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AGENDA
Presented by RAWDON CHRISTIE
RAWDON Around a thousand people rallied in Manukau City Square yesterday in the wake of three killings in the city in the past fortnight. Some carried placards calling for harsher sentences and stricter bail and parole laws. Meanwhile National's Leader, John Key, says the party would address the problems of places like Manukau with correction camps for youth offenders, stricter bail and parole laws and he's promising to have more to say about sentencing. National's Justice Spokesperson is Simon Power, he's with Guyon Espiner now.
GUYON ESPINER
Well Simon Power we've had a machete attack in Hastings overnight, we've had some awful murders and hit and run crimes in South Auckland, are these just random acts of violence or are they part of a systemic problem to which there is a political solution.
SIMON POWER – Justice, National
Look I think they are part of a systemic problem, we've seen over the last nine years a 44% increase in violent crime with young people between 14 and 16 years old, that’s gone up 47% during the same period. Although crime across other categories might be steady violent crime and the intensity of the crime that we're experiencing as a country is increasing at an alarming rate Guyon.
GUYON Why is that?
SIMON Well I think it's easy as the Prime Minister said this week to just simply talk about alcohol, I think alcohol is one factor but it is actually a pretty complicated problem. Across the board we've gotta deal with things like gangs, we've gotta deal with things like the P epidemic, the bail laws for example have been weakened in recent years, that is making a difference.
GUYON Okay there are a lot of issues there, let's just have some specifics, we've had a thousand extra Police over this parliamentary term, would National increase Police numbers further.
SIMON We've said and John has said that the thousand new Police which was agreed between New Zealand First and Labour which is due to finish as I understand it at the Budget cycle next year, we would certainly maintain that.
GUYON Giving extra Police?
SIMON Yeah what we're wanting to do – just let me finish – is get a ratio of about one to 500, that is one Police Officer for every 500 in population in New Zealand, now at present it's about one to every 504, 503, so we'd be working towards that goal.
GUYON So how many extra Police would that be?
SIMON Well it depends on how the population is, it depends on the population.
GUYON Well at the current population, if you took power how many extra Police are we talking about?
SIMON We would get that ratio close to one to 500, it's bigger than that now, and I have to tell you that the problem with the new Police is that many of them are being sent into areas that are not front line policing, and that first tranch of 340 odd new Police Officers we saw 12 go to front line traffic work, we saw three sent overseas, we've seen others moving into areas which is not front line policing Guyon. Now I think one of the keys to people feeling safer in the streets is actually seeing Police as they're wandering around.
GUYON But we've had those extra Police and we've still got the problems, so is it gonna make any difference, I mean you might have a ratio of one Police Officer for every 500 people but they're not going to be able to stop those random acts of violence that we're talking about are they?
SIMON Well as I said it's a complex matrix to use the phrase but at the end of the day more Police or higher better proportion per ratio of population is one factor. Look dealing with gangs and P, look the problem …
GUYON Let's talk about another drug – alcohol – because this is where the government's focus has been this week. Do we need to do something about the availability of liquor, do we need to crack down on those liquor stores, is alcohol in solving that part of the solution here?
SIMON Yes it is, and we've said for some months that the proliferation of liquor licenses and the ease with which these liquor licenses are obtained, the narrow grounds for objection to the liquor licenses and other such factors, the hours that the licenses are given over for, are serious problems. But let me just say this, it's not alcohol alone and the Prime Minister is wrong is she gets up after a post cabinet press conference under pressure and just simply says alcohol is the only answer, it's a very important factor Guyon but it can't be seen in isolation.
GUYON You voted personally for liberalisation of alcohol, you wanted to keep the age at 18 rather than 20?
SIMON And the interesting thing about that is when the Police came before the Select Committee to talk to us about the effect of liquor on young people and offending they said that in actual fact in 50% of cases where a crime is committed and a drink was had before that crime was committed, that drink was had at home. The proliferation of liquor licenses is a serious issue, the age is only part of the issue, I personally think the availability of alcohol through outlets is a more significant issue.
GUYON Okay, let's talk about some of the things that Sensible Sentencing has discussed, and I want to just take you through and see what your position is on these things. They say that life should mean life, what's you're take on that?
SIMON Well I'm not sure what they mean by that exactly.
GUYON Well I guess it means that you're in prison until you die.
SIMON Yeah well look I think, I think there is a case for saying in certain circumstances there should be no parole, I think there is a case for saying that.
GUYON Parole – they say there should be only parole in exceptional circumstances, do you agree with that?
SIMON I think that where somebody is a repeat violent offender the chances of them getting parole should be nil, John Key has said on occasions prior to this interview that his view is that there room to narrow that parole eligibility, for that top end hard core offender National's view has been there should be no parole.
GUYON Okay, they also say that there should be maximum sentences for violent offenders, I mean we've seen those increase over the period of the Labour government, I mean would you lengthen sentences?
SIMON I think there is a case to be made for lengthening sentences in certain areas, for example as you know John announced earlier this year that the tools that would be made available to the Youth Court for lengthening supervisory sentences for young people would certainly factor into that occasion.
GUYON But for the serious crimes, for the murders, for those very serious crimes that we're getting what 15 odd a year, sometimes a lot more than that now, I mean is there a case for making those sentences even longer?
SIMON There is a case but the case should primarily revolve around the eligibility or non eligibility for parole, in other words if you are sentenced to 25 years for a vicious murder, if you're a repeat offender then 25 years should mean 25 years in those circumstances.
GUYON Okay one of the panellists, Virginia Larsen mentioned this earlier in the show but our prisons are bursting at the seams, I mean we have reached the highest rate of incarceration in 2006, is something like seven and a half thousand people locked up. Now if you're going to abolish parole and lengthen these sentences you're gonna need to build more prisons aren’t you?
SIMON Well I think on the numbers that we have done, certainly in a first term you would be looking at building another prison. The interesting thing about that particular course of action of course and I've found this extremely interesting this week…
GUYON Let's just back up a little bit there, that’s very interesting so you would say that National would need to build a new prison in its first term?
SIMON I think we would.
GUYON Where would you put it?
SIMON Well look I'm not in government at this stage, I haven’t got any idea about what's a suitable location and what's not, it's like asking me you know how many people do you think you should have on a staff, I don’t know until you get there. What I do know is that public safety comes before the government's concern about reducing the prison population. This week we've had Phil Goff proudly saying how big the prison population is when only two months ago his government was saying when they introduced the Criminal Law Reform Bill that the most important thing for them was reducing the prison population. Government can't have it both way on this thing, they're either gonna have Phil Goff out there trying to talk tough or the Prime Minister saying she's concerned about the fact that the prison population's too high.
GUYON Okay and you like to talk tough on this issue, but isn't it a pretty depressing solution just to build another prison. I mean it's not working is it, we've got one of the highest incarceration rates in the western world, we lock people up for a long long time, it is not working, your answer it only to build another prison.
SIMON No my answer is that if indeed the prison population tracks as it is, any government would have no alternative but to do that quite frankly. Second point though as I said earlier there are a whole other range of ways of preventing crime, we're interested in dealing to offending and reoffending which is why John Key's announcements earlier this year on youth offending are so important to that equation.
GUYON Let's look at that issue of boot camps for young people. I mean in July 1999 the then National government was given advice on this, they were looking at bringing it back in, the officials said it doesn’t work, it doesn’t stop reoffending, it's been abolished in the US, Australia and the UK all in the late 90s because it's not working, I mean this is a failed policy of the past isn't it?
SIMON No it's not and that’s exactly why there are three other elements to the policy, one is to ensure parenting orders for these young people form part of the policy,.
GUYON We'll move on to that in a second I just want to talk to you …
SIMON It's part of the same equation Guyon.
GUYON I know but there's one element I want to talk about and that is these boot camps for young people, is it really gonna make a blind bit of difference to have someone in an army camp for three months.
SIMON It doesn’t make a difference if you dump them into the correctional 12 week programme and then take them out without any surrounding support and put them back into the environment from which they came, and that case has been shown internationally, they do not work.
GUYON But it hasn’t been, it's been abolished in Australia, it's been abolished in the US and the UK, it's not working.
GUYON It is working where there's support and those three other elements I talked about, or John talked about earlier this year when he made his announcement have been integrated into that approach. In an isolated way taking somebody who has caused trouble, putting them into a correctional course for 12 weeks and then taking them out again has not proven to be successful, but if you are dealing with drug and alcohol rehabilitation, if you deal with mentoring programmes and have parenting orders locked into that process we're confident that the success rate will be much higher.
GUYON Okay let's talk about the tools that the Police have, I mean you’ve talked about them having tazers, do you believe that the Police should be able to be armed and carry as a normal course of events the tazer weapon?
SIMON Well what John Key has said is that pending the outcome of the report on the trial being available we would back it. The tazer during the 12 month trial period was drawn on a 120 occasions, of those 120 occasions on only 19 occasions was it actually discharged, in other words having the red dot placed on you as you are in the commission of an offence seems to be a pretty good deterrent for stopping the offence.
GUYON There's been discussion about arming the Police more widely more generally recently, do you think there's a case for Police to carry guns?
SIMON I think overall New Zealanders have been pretty cautious about arming the Police on a full time basis, we should proceed pretty cautiously on that front, but quite frankly with the incidence of violent crime that we've seen in recent years, having a look at such a process on a case by case area by area basis in a cautious way makes some sense.
GUYON I'll leave it there, but back to you Rawdon.
RAWDON Time to bring in the panel now, Virginia do you want to kick off?
VIRGINIA LARSEN – North and South
To the prisons Simon. I gather at the moment it's costing us about $200 a day per prison.
SIMON $253.
VIRGINIA $253 – What about home detention, you’ve got a lot of people in there, they are property offenders they are probably not a danger to society, any other choices just locking all of them up?
SIMON Yes certainly Virginia, the government bought home detention in as a standalone sentence in October last year, in effect from 1 October last year, we voted for that, we think home detention has its place but the key here as far as National's concerned is that home detention should be for low level non violent offenders and it gets increasingly frustrating when you see perhaps the inappropriate application of home detention to people who go on to commit crimes which clearly indicate that they shouldn’t have been on that scheme in the first instance.
MARIE McNICHOLAS – www.newsroom.co.nz
And just on the cost issue again, have you costed it? I mean have you got a price tag on for instance changing the ratio of Police numbers and I've quickly roughly calculated it and it's around a couple of thousand extra Police, now that alone must put a bit of a dent in the budget and if you look at you're – in fairness – your youth justice ideas, some of them are pretty enlightened in a way, but they and anything to do with rehabilitation, extra military, extra hands on and nurturing is very expensive, what's the cost of that, you must have some idea.
SIMON Well we know that the youth justice policy that John launched earlier this year which included the education component, the post leaving school component was just under 100 million dollars at full noise once it was fully implemented, that would take some time obviously to work that through, and he's made it pretty clear that that’s where he wants the investment to be, is at the start of the crime process rather than at the end of the crime process.
VIRGINIA So is that where the spending priority will go?
SIMON I think what you'll see closer to the election, in fact I know what you'll see closer to the election is an emphasis on – as much on crime prevention and preventing offending as dealing with reoffending and of course the unfortunate factor in all of this which is never mentioned in interviews or discussions like this and that’s about the victim's role in all of this.
RAWDON Simon Power I've been hearing a lot here, so we're talking a lot about preventing offending, we're talking about arming Police maybe with tazers possibly, we're talking about extra Police numbers, we're talking about an extra prison, we've talked about more focus, John Key's talked about more focus on literacy and numeracy and rehabilitation. This is going to be expensive and there's no money.
SIMON Well John um – I'm convinced that there are savings to be made in this area I've gotta tell you, for example even if you look at the most minute things in the law and order area, the Corrections Department's handling of its budgets over the last four to five years has been quite frankly abysmal, there is plenty of room inside there to have a realignment of where your priorities lie.
RAWDON Where?
SIMON Oh well I can give you a good example, I would much rather have seen eleven million dollars spent on drug and alcohol rehabilitation for people coming out of our prisons rather than spent on landscaping four new prisons.
RAWDON What about private prisons?
SIMON Yeah look I don’t have any difficulty with tendering for private management for our prison system. We know that when the Auckland Central Remand Prison was managed privately that the education courses that the drug and alcohol, the literacy and numeracy courses, the work programmes that were going on in that prison were first class, local Iwi were fully engaged with the work that was going on at Auckland Central Remand and frankly it was being done at a better rate than the public system was able to deliver it at. I think there is room for that but what I'd say is this – I think what you'd do is you'd tender for it on a prison by prison basis, the department could be part of that tendering process as they were with Auckland Central Remand when they came fourth out of the four people who tendered.
RAWDON You're talking about tendering for services within prisons, what about – I mean if you're gonna build a new prison and there's no sort of fiscal flexibility to do so could that be tendered out, the actual building of it?
SIMON Oh look one thing we would not do and I want to make this absolutely clear is adopt the collaborative working arrangement system that this government used when it built its four new prisons and saw that budget blow out by 600 million dollars.
MARIE But if you accept that there's fat in the system and you take it out, there's never gonna be enough to do what you want to do.
SIMON I think you'll find actually that there is plenty of room to move. We know for example that with $253 a night to keep someone in a prison I cannot conceive Marie that there is not room to move at that figure.
VIRGINIA What about some targeting, I mean Andres Becroft Principal Youth Court Judge, he will say that most of the youth are actually okay, that hard core, I'm sure he said that they're probably about a 1000 boys. Now that’s not a big number, is there a way of perhaps identifying that core group and bringing in some of these programmes that – you know bring the education other issues to bear.
SIMON Yes there is Virginia you're dead right, your numbers as far as I'm aware are spot on. The issue with particularly young boys actually can be found in the work that I've done, the reading that I've done, in truancy, it's a really clear signal. Now not every truant youngster is going to end up becoming a hardened criminal, but I tell you what most hardened criminals were at some time truant.
VIRGINIA So do we need more truancy officer?
SIMON Well what I'm suggesting is the government's been promising over the last three terms a national truancy database so we actually know where these kids are and that we can pin them down and help them. When John gave his speech earlier this year on the youth plan, the issue of dealing with young people in a quasi punitive but quite constructive way, that is with the parenting orders, mentoring, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, was all part of the package designed to not leave them alone on a course for 12 weeks which makes them fitter and then just put them back into the environment from whence they came.
VIRGINIA We have corrective training didn’t we which yes I think it made them – they were fitter burglars, harder to catch after that but it made no difference, I think they had about a 95% reoffending rate on that original….
SIMON Well we've taken the view that the public is actually tired of hearing the problem being stated and that we've tried to come up with specific legislative changes to try and deal with some of these law and order issues, we've released four major areas of policy so far, we're very pleased that the government's seen fit to adopt a fair portion of that.
MARIE Given the emphasis where you're putting your case today which seems to me on rehabilitation and working with the youth, does it not sit comfortably with you personally to be hard on offenders and you know that whole lock em up throw away the key kind of mantra. I don’t get the feeling that you much take to that?
SIMON Look I think the most important thing you can do in this area is be balanced, be credible and show the public that you’ve been thorough in the way that you’ve thought about how to change these things. Look the public meetings that I attend Marie people talk about smashing the gangs, they talk about dealing to issues around young people, you’ve gotta have answers, they talk about putting the victim at the centre of the criminal justice system, look people have been saying those clipped messages for 50 years in New Zealand politics, what National's trying to say is we've had some answers, we've put some policy out in these areas over the last several months and the government has seen fit to adopt a fair few of them.
MARIE There's still a bit of policy to come though isn't there?
SIMON There's a substantial amount of policy in this area to come.
MARIE Well when are we gonna see this?
SIMON Well the law and order document was completed and handed to the leader on the 1st of November last year, you’ve seen four announcements so far in the area of gangs, Police, youth crime and victims.
MARIE What are you afraid of, why haven’t we seen the rest?
SIMON Because the remaining three to four big announcements will be made by John closer to the election, but let me assure you the work has been done as thoroughly in those areas as it has been done in the other four.
MARIE It must be dealing with the worst offenders would it?
SIMON You can expect to see some more work around that area.
RAWDON Gangs – you just mentioned the policy has been announced, they're the problem?
SIMON Look I think particularly around the drug P, gangs are the problem, I think the New Zealand public has had a gutsful of people saying this is a group of New Zealanders who are just looking to each other for comfort and comradeship, this is organised crime and these people have got to be stopped and we've outlined out plan of four legislative areas where we would change the current law, the government this week has adopted two out of four of those which quite frankly you know they rubbished it at the time, they're now saying that they would be helpful in going towards dealing with gangs, and we're flattered by that.
VIRGINIA Didn’t they get Al Capone on tax evasion in the end, I mean are there ways of – I mean these are organised.
MARIE Well that’s an issue too about you know Police, is it not Police numbers but perhaps Police methods, about maybe they just have to work a bit smarter.
SIMON Well I think they do have to work a bit smarter which is a bit of a worry as to the disestablishment of the Serious Fraud Office actually, that is a serious concern, something that we voted against at the first reading because I'm worried that the white collar crime component of the law and order debate will be lost if Police who should quite rightly be concentrating on the more hard end, violent end crime.
MARIE Can I ask you – just change slightly – on Corrections. It bothers you. What exactly would you do to clean it out? Sack them all and put them on social welfare? Well they're arm's length from you they're run by the State Services Commission, you can't go round sacking people and appointing people.
SIMON No buy you can give a very firm indication as to where you want the emphasis to lie.
MARIE And what is that emphasis?
SIMON You'll have to wait until closer to the election.
RAWDON Okay thank you for that Simon Power, thanks for joining us.
