this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Longer sentences do not function as a deterrent, that's true. It does, however, mean offenders cannot commit violent crimes, and in general be a menace to society, from behind bars.
If you're saying National will punish violent offenders more than they are, but keep the current incarceration levels, then I'd agree with that sentiment.
Of course there is the problem of completely understaffed prisons at the moment, but that is a problem regardless of the colour of the tie of the PM.
Our incarceration rate will no doubt go up, but I, and most NZers I suspect, accept that.
I agree most will. My only problem is it doesn't solve the underlying problems, it just puts more burden on the taxpayer.
Ultimately, I agree violent and sexual crimes are being sentenced too lightly, but outside of this I would prefer to address the problems that cause crime (poverty, education, etc etc). We don't need to be locking up kids, because it does more harm than good. I'm happy to lock up rapists though, for example.
What happens to their kids?
Do you think their kids are better off with or without a parent like that in their lives?
The parent doesn't get removed from their life. What happens is the kid grows up thinking the law is stupid and police are the enemy, because they have to see their parent once a week at a scheduled meeting instead of them being able to have the parent support them at their rugby game on Saturday.
They don't hate the parent, they hate the justice system that locked them up for the childs entire childhood because of one stupid thing they did as a young adult that didn't even hurt anyone except the insurance company (and they only hear one side of the story so you can't argue back on that).
And that parent gets out of jail at 30, has no friends except from prison, and they can't find a job because of their criminal record. They end up in a life of crime, in and out of prison, and their kid follows in their footsteps.
Contrast this to the parent that did the same crime, did some home-d but could keep their job and be therefore their kid. They realised it was dumb, the kid grew up away from the prison system, learnt that police are not the enemy, and neither the parent or child ended up in a lifetime of crime.
By the third generation, you have kids who have never known crime.
But that is so, so many election cycles away, and polititions are calling for blood on people who seem different to us, so people vote for it. Meanwhile business is booming in the for-profit prison, and yet crime rates haven't gone down because statistically "hard on crime" approaches only have short term impacts on crime.
It would be nice if he had any evidence whatsoever to back it up, but nobody in this thread seems to have any evidence behind them.
The closest anyone has come is some very tenuous evidence that long prison sentences don't serve as a deterrent, which ignores the fact that it does keep offenders away from the general public for as long as possible.
There are plenty, but here's some, and also here, and here.
Once again, you conveniently ignore the fact that, while prison may not have a dramatic effect on recidivism rates, something that evidence from other commenters contradicts, there is the little fact that offenders can't commit these acts from behind bars.
At worst, it puts the damage they do to society on pause for a while.
The evidence does not contradict it, but regardless.
I agreed with this point elsewhere. Locking a violent criminal up removes them from society, absolutely.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that perceived harsher punishments will affect the crime rate. I think, on balance of available data, that there is no clear evidence that it will. It will cost taxpayers more money for no tangible benefit.
Sorry, but even most children would see this as absolute nonsense, especially if this was a violent crime.
You're reeeally giving this hypothetical person the benefit of the doubt by assuming they'd be present in the child's life in a positive way.
If they learn the first time, sure. How many chances do you think people deserve?
Children take things at face value. Adults can use data to show that imprisoning more people doesn't lead to lower crime rates except in the short term.
You've also changed the goal posts. Most crime is not violent crime.
I'm sorry, but you are assuming bad faith. Not everyone who breaks the law is a bad person. They only need to be a better role model out of prison than they would be in prison, and with that we get generational change. It takes time, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
It's also important to note that women's brains don't finish developing until around their early 20s, and men their late 20s. Young people are dumb, and it's not their fault. Someone who was an idiot at 20 can be a positive role model at 25, but not if they are in prison.
More than National and Act are willing to give them. They tried sending youths to boot camps last time they were power. The only thing it did was buy them votes, it did nothing for crime so it got shut down. Now they tested to see if the same thing works twice, apparently it does, so now we have to run a boot camp for another couple of years until we see it's still not working.
We are operating a US style prison system, and until Labour took over we had an imprisonment rate almost as high, one of the highest in the developed world. I would much prefer a Scandinavian style system, where we accept people make mistakes and we try to give them the support to reintegrate in society. They do this for violent criminals including murderers, but I'd be happy if we at least started somewhere, and keeping non-violent criminals out of prison would be a great start.
And don't even get me started on victims rights. Most criminals, and especially most violent criminals, are themselves victims, and no one seems interested in their rights.
Reducing crime requires small improvements over generations, not throwing more people in prison.
You're vastly underestimating how much insight most children have to how the world works, in my view.
For example, I knew my father was often full of shit in my early teens.
It's really interesting. I somewhat recently read a book about raising children, where a researcher talked about studies they did with kids. Kids understand a lot, at a young age (I think they did the studies on kids around ages 3-5). Kids will humour you, instinctively pretending they believe you, because it's still helping them learn about the world. I know that kids are often smarter than adults 🙂
But it's really obvious that putting people in prison for crimes will reduce the crime rate. It's so obvious, it's almost impossible to believe it's not true. Neither kids nor adults are good at spotting counterintuitive things like that. The only reason we know it's true is because of the vast data collection done these days (Probably best not to get me started on the involuntary data collection/data sovereignty).
Not only does throwing more people in prison for longer not reduce crime, it doesn't even reduce violent crime. It literally does nothing more than cost the tax payer money, and satisfy a medieval sense of vengeance.
Is this why violent crime was down under Labour?
There is no data that shows violent crime increased because of lower incarceration rates. That's the whole point.
There are a whole host of other factors that cause increases in crime, and even if harsher punishments lowered crime slightly, the most effective measures is addressing the underlying causes of crime in the first place. Mental health, poverty and inequality all have by far the biggest impact in crime rates. Locking up more people won't change that.
Which Labour failed miserably at, by the way.
They certainly should have done more, I absolutely agree, but I do not think it's fair to lay the blame for increased crime squarely at their feet.