Crime and Punishment

Three Strikes About to Bite Hard

David Garrett, former ACT MP
Republished from Kiwiblog

When the three strikes (3S) bill was making its way through parliament I told Clayton Cosgrove – in response to an interjection – that it might be ten to fifteen years before 3S would really start to bite. Although Cosgrove immediately tried to make capital from my answer, I was not  unhappy with that prediction – in fact I thought it a little optimistic. In my view we have taken a generation to get into the mess we are in with violent offending, and it might take a generation to reverse it. It seems I was unduly pessimistic.

Unless there are extremely good reasons which would preclude such a result, we are about to get our first  “strike” offender sentenced to Life Without Parole (“LWOP”) for murder as a second strike.  Justin Vance Turner, aged 28, has pleaded guilty to murder. It is his second “strike” offence, and accordingly, he should be sentenced to LWOP in accordance with s.86E (2) of the Sentencing Act. That section requires that a stage two offender guilty of murder should serve a sentence of LWOP “unless the court is satisfied that given the circumstances of the offence and the offender, it would be manifestly unjust to do so.”

The “manifestly unjust” provision was one of the conditions the National Party required in order for them to support the 3S Bill beyond first reading.
It did not take long for ACT to agree to the amendment. The words “unless…manifestly unjust” have already been defined in case law. It is a very high hurdle to surmount. If for nothing else, Justice Graham Lang’s sentence notes will be pored over by everyone interested in 3S to see what he says about that phrase in the 3S context.

So what  “circumstances of the offence and the offender”  could cause Justice Lang to sentence to life imprisonment with a finite minimum Non Parole Period (NPP) instead of LWOP? As for the offence, in my respectful view there is absolutely nothing which would justify giving Turner the benefit of the “manifestly unjust” proviso. If the news report is accurate, the hapless victim – a homeless man – was kicked and punched until unconscious, and then Turner “continued stomping on him with enough force that  his head bounced off the floor.”

Given that Turner told police his intent was to kill, it would seem he had little choice but to plead guilty – although I suspect the motivation for the plea at an early stage (the trial was to begin on 1 December) was to try to avoid LWOP on the basis of an early guilty plea. Again in my respectful view, that is no reason to depart from the presumption created by s. 86E (2). Nothing in the 3S provisions of the Sentencing Act suggest early guilty pleas should be a factor in sentence.

What about the “circumstances of the offender”? Because of privacy laws we know little about him other than he has a first strike to his name  for serious  violent offending. There is a suggestion from the terms of the remand that his fitness to plead may have been an issue, but clearly that is no longer the case.

Again in my respectful view, if the court was to find that because of some psychological condition falling short of a “disease of the mind” which would be a reason for an acquittal (Turner was prone to episodes of extreme violence), this ought to be even more reason to lock him up for the rest of his life. It is clear from his actions that he is a menace to society, and given his age, he will be for a long time.

One option the Judge has is to decline to impose LWOP, but to give a very lengthy NPP – say thirty or even forty years. If the Judge chose to go down that route the sentence would almost certainly be appealed. That is no bad thing, as it would give the Court of Appeal the chance to make some observation on the decision to apply the “manifestly unjust” proviso, and on the length of minimum NPP that ought to be imposed if the proviso was applied.

Finally it should be noted that LWOP as a possible sentence for murder was not  part of the original 3S Bill, although it was passed into law at the same time. At the 2008 election both ACT and the Nats campaigned on making LWOP available for our worst murderers.  From the aftermath of the  2014 election it appears both ACT and the Nats have lost the appetite  for law and order measures. In time, 2008 -10 may come to be regarded as a brief “window”  which opened and allowed our justice system to start dispensing real justice to killers – and their victims.

There are many who would argue that a sentence for the rest of one’s natural life to prison for murder is cruel and unusual.  How could a Christian contemplate such a sentence, let alone support it?  Whilst it does not justify the sentence, or any sentence in itself, a lifetime in prison does not necessarily mean the end of meaningful human life. 

As evidence for that contention, consider the the following video.

Don’t Waste Your Life Sentence

June 6, 2012

• by John Piper
• Topic: The Unwasted Life

The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, LA, is the largest and historically one of the bloodiest maximum-security prisons in the USA. In 2009, Desiring God and John Piper were invited to Angola to learn about prison life, hear from men who have been radically changed by the gospel, and minister to many of the 5,000 inmates.

Don’t Waste Your Life Sentence confronts you with the realities of inmates who, though their lives appear to have been wasted, often have a greater grasp on eternity than those on the outside.

//player.vimeo.com/video/48640251

Prisoners and the Vote

Sensible Sentencing

A career criminal and (now) jail-house lawyer is taking a case to the High Court attempting to overturn legislation which denies prisoners the vote.  The case has been inspired by the European Court of Human Rights which has infamously ruled that denial of suffrage to prisoners violates their human rights.  New Zealand’s own Bill of Rights–a piece of statutory law–declares voting to be a, you guessed it, human right.

The argument being made amounts to question-begging of the highest order.  Point One: denial of suffrage to prisoners is a prima facie violation of the NZ Human Rights Act.  Point Two: denial of suffrage is cruel and unusual punishment, since it does not contribute in any meaningful way to the rehabilitation of prisoners. Point Three: the European Court of Human Rights ruling is a fantastic precedent, which has all sorts of implications for antediluvians in the Antipodes.

The question begged is this: does incarceration represent any removal or diminution or denial of any human rights–declared and ostensibly protected in the NZ Human Rights Act–at all?  One would imagine so.  Being told when to rise, when to comply with “lights out”, when to eat, what to wear, where to go, where not to go, and how to conduct oneself at all times, with retributive punishment for non-compliance, violates just about every freedom right imaginable.  So, if the argument that denial of suffrage for prisoners amounts to a breach of the NZ Human Rights Act is deemed correct, all incarceration of convicted criminals must also breach that Act. But if incarceration of prisoners in this country does not breach the NZ Human Rights Act, then neither can withdrawing suffrage from them. 

We are aware that some folk philosophically oppose retributive punishment of any kind for criminals.
  They believe it dehumanises them, making them worse.  We are aware that our present system of dealing with criminals is based upon balancing three principles (punishment, protection of the public, and rehabilitation) which in many instances are in conflict with each other, and none of which are ever fully satisfied.  Removal of suffrage rights is a punishment, a retributive consequence of criminal acts, of the same order as incarceration. As such it is not a violation of the NZ Human Rights Act at all.

An opinion writer in the Waikato Times put the matter in focus for everyone endowed with even the smallest modicum of common sense:

News had also just broken that the criminal Arthur Taylor was fighting for prisoners’ rights to vote in the High Court. . . .(H)ere is a man who has broken the law 150 times appealing to the law for the opportunity to choose the lawmakers. It’s like a comedy. Why on earth does he care who makes laws? If his past is anything to go by he won’t be a huge fan of keeping the laws his chosen politicians make anyway.

That, really, is the core problem he has, poor bloke. An argument about rights always sounds so soulless when one refuses to uphold the responsibilities that go with them. Arthur wants cake when he has already eaten it.

The very simple way for him to have the right to vote would be to stay out of jail. Then he could vote to his heart’s content. No-one would get in the way of his “fundamental freedoms”, by virtue of the fact he wasn’t getting in the way of theirs. After all, that is what committing a crime boils down to; stealing rights from our fellow citizens. We steal their right to life when we murder; we steal their right to own property when we take things not lawfully ours; we steal their right to the truth when we commit fraud. Having stolen the rights of his fellow citizens, Arthur wants more. That’s just greedy. If he was appealing his multitude of convictions, I would understand. A man or woman should always have the right to fight to clear their name. But once they are convicted, and all the dust has settled, there has to be some way to make things right for the victim. Quite understandably, that means removing or restricting the “fundamental freedoms” they once abused to commit their crimes.

Yes, that even includes the fellow inmates Arthur refers to who have children on the outside, and whose hearts now yearn to have a say on educational policy. They should have been thinking about the welfare of their children when they were deciding whether or not to commit crimes, because I’m sure having a mum and dad there for you is more important than how your teachers get paid.

We are not great fans of incarceration. We do believe, however, that all criminal acts have consequences that have to be faced up to and dealt with.  We believe in restorative justice and restitution.  We do not believe it should be regarded as a soft-option if properly done.  We also believe that it contributes most effectively to rehabilitation.  But then there are the career criminals–folk who have been through all the restorative options, but have returned once again to preying upon others.  For them, rehabilitation and restitution is ebbing away, if not already long gone.  We also believe that certain crimes are capital in nature–so evil and egregiously extreme–that restitution and rehabilitation have nothing to contribute and ought to play no part.  We believe this is the Christian position on the matter.

In the meantime, we believe that incarceration should protect the community, whilst providing every opportunity for restorative justice and restitution.  We believe strongly in educational and skill-development programmes for willing prisoners.  We believe strongly in treating prisoners with respect and dignity.  But none of this removes the retributive aspect of incarceration.  Losing the right to vote is just one aspect of retribution to enable prisoners to face up to the consequences of their evil-doing. 

Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Criminality, Part III

Our Most Dynamic Growth Industry

There is one proposition the criminal justice system in New Zealand is pretty much agreed upon: prisons are bad.  For some they represent cruel and unusual punishment.  For others they are bad because they socialise inmates into becoming career criminals.   Still others reject prisons because they put the full responsibility for criminal acts upon the criminal and ignore the social causes of crime.  They are society’s way of deflecting blame upon itself on to others.  Yet others regard prisons as dehumanizing institutions, akin to the evil of slavery.  Others–more pragmatically inclined–point to the high recidivism rates which provide compelling evidence that prisons fail to deter criminals, on the one hand, and fail to rehabilitate, on the other.  Yet others complain about the costs of building and running prisons. 

Consequently, the criminal justice system in New Zealand represent not so much a “war on crime” but a “war on prisons”.  This is the argument David Fraser makes in his book, Badlands. NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa, Auckland: Howling At The Moon Publishing, Ltd, 2011.) What is the evidence?
Here are some indicators.  In 1999 a nationwide referendum was held that attracted over 85 percent support.  It called for minimum sentencing and hard labour for criminals.  The incoming Labour Government not only ignored the petition–it moved drastically in the other direction.

The freshly elected Labour-led Government subsequently made violent criminals eligible for parole after serving just a third of their sentence and ordered judges to impose “the least-restrictive sentence that is appropriate in the circumstances”.

These were radical moves against incarceration.  Eligibility for parole after serving only one third of a sentence has had far reaching consequences, including those released going on to commit more crimes.  And directions to the courts to impose the least restrictive sentence has institutionalised the anti-prison bias into the court system itself. 

A second evidence is the introduction of a wide range of sentences as alternatives to prison. 

If the court cannot avoid a conviction then legislation enables the courts to sentence the offender to a variety of community sentences.  The argument which Correction officials and others have put forward that they are an effective way of reforming criminals, is based on pseudo-science.  Similarly, their case that supervision programmes are necessary to meet offenders so-called ‘needs’, is entirely bogus . . . . I am of the firm opinion that their true single purpose was, and is, to prevent offenders going to jail.  (Fraser, Badlands, op cit., p. 49.)

A third evidence of an anti-prison prejudice amongst academics and Corrections bureaucrats and politicians is the misuse of  fines.  The concept of sentencing by the imposition of monetary fines is sound, provided the payment of the fine is used to restitute the victim (not fund the State).  Non payment of fines should arguably result in an automatic prison sentence (with the fine probably being paid to the victim by the State–after all, why should the victim suffer further because the perpetrator fails to pay a fine?)   But these days the State bends over backwards not to incarcerate those who fail to pay fines.  The Courts can now reduce the penalty if the perpetrator is in financial hardship.  If the criminal still refuses or fails to pay, other fallback alternative penalties can be resorted to, such as community detention and home detention.

Community based sentences are a joke.  The sanctions for failing to show up are pretty much non-existent.
The 2002 legislation had made certain that up to twenty per cent of the so called work hours could be spent in training in basic work and living skills.  In many cases, this means no more than group work discussions organised by the probation service, which the offenders will frequently fail to attend.  There is also a clause in the Sentencing Act 2002 which allows for a work order to be cancelled if the offender “is unable to comply with the terms of the sentence.”  (Fraser, ibid., p. 50). 

But it got worse.

. . . within only a few short years, community based sentences were being imposed on over 50 per cent of property offenders and as many as 45 per cent  of violent offenders.  Furthermore, by 2008, a Ministry of Justice report revealed that thousands of cases of violence resulted in work-related community sentences. (Ibid.)

The Commentariat and the elites of our society are well out of step with the general public.  There has been a slight backlash, resulting in a new Parole Act requiring a minimum of two thirds of a sentence be served before parole became a possibility.  The hue and cry from the anti-prison cabal was deafening.  According to their reckoning, Armageddon threatened.  Then there has been the Three Strikes sentencing bill, which has passed into law.  This will have more and more of an impact over time (provided it survives another left-wing government). 

The increasing criminality of New Zealand society is not a product of the complexities of modern society.  Nor is it due to the “poor getting poorer”.  The responsibility can be largely laid at the feet of the criminal justice system itself which has shown itself reflexively prejudiced against prisons. 

We do not argue that prisons are the “be all and end all” of criminal justice.  Far from it.  But neglect them at our peril.  We have.  And crime has flourished.  It is one of the most dynamic growth industries in the country. 

New Zealand’s Crime Victim Survey in 2006 revealed that there are almost 3 million crimes committed every year and of these only approximately 1% ever results in a jail sentence.  In 2007 only 9% of all sentences passed in New Zealand were custodial.  The rest consisted of community sentences of various kinds, monetary penalties, and discharges, leaving the criminals concerned free to carry on their life of crime.  (Ibid., p. 36).

Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Criminality, Part II

Sensible Sentencing

The fundamental thesis of the book, Badlands is that criminality has risen exponentially in New Zealand in the last fifty years because of radical changes in the criminal justice system.  Government policy has been to blame.  The danger of this thesis is that it risks becoming the mythical silver bullet: change the policies of criminal justice in New Zealand and crime will reduce.

We are in no doubt that a change in criminal justice policies, in sentencing, is much needed and will have a significant impact upon crime in the country.  The reason is that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a very small group of hardened recidivist offenders.  But the causes of crime against property and persons are manifold and complex.  Changes in sentencing will help: they will not remove criminal activity entirely.  Even as society advocates for radical much-needed changes in sentencing policy, it must not over-promise or raise expectations that such changes would mean that criminal offending would cease and that crime would be eradicated.

One problem to be addressed is the fundamental confusions that swirls around penology in this country.  There are three objectives constantly cited in the matter of dealing with crime–which are often at cross purposes.  The first objective seeks retributive punishment in our sentencing and criminal justice policies.  The second seeks rehabilitation of the criminal back into the community.  The third seeks protection against future criminal acts by recidivist criminals.  All too often these three–punishment, rehabilitation, and community protection–work against each other.  If community protection is the prime objective, longer prison sentences will trump all other policies in the criminal justice system.  If rehabilitation of the criminal back into the community is the prime goal, then non-custodial sentences, coupled with training, education, and social welfare for the criminal become the absolute priority.  If punishment for criminal acts is the primary goal and responsibility then inflicting pain, hardship, and thorough-going inconvenience upon the convicted criminal is essential.

Public debates about the criminal justice system reflect ships passing in the night because the protagonist of  one of the three objectives sees all criminal offending and punishment through his particular prism (say, rehabilitation) and his opponent sees everything through the prism of community protection.  The ships sail past each other, lobbing broadsides at the each other, but never striking a mortal blow–making the public debate unceasing, wearying, and without any progress.

The critical way-point in the debate is to recognise that all three aspects–punishment, rehabilitation, and community protection–have validity and a sane criminal justice system must employ all three.  The crying need is to develop criminal justice policies which enable all to work together, without working at cross purposes, tearing each other down. 

In Badlands, David Fraser tends to focus a great deal upon community protection, and therefore emphasises the need for longer, more severe jail sentences [David, Fraser, Badlands–NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa: Howling at the Moon Publishing Ltd, 2011.)]  Yet he does concede there is need for gradation in sentencing.  There is also a need to have the three core objectives in criminal sentencing change over a career of criminal offending. There are times and periods when rehabilitation ought be more important and to the fore; there are other periods (later in a criminal’s career) when community protection must become paramount.

He makes the following observation about Singapore’s criminal justice system:

Although Singapore’s success in deterring crime is largely due to its greater use of prisons than many other countries, it is not the only aspect worth noting.  Singapore puts a great deal of energy into rehabilitative efforts for offenders but only those with one or two previous convictions  It has understood the lesson, ignored by New Zealand justice officials, that it is a waste of resources to try and encourage persistent criminals with long histories of crime, to reform.  Singapore’s attitude is uncompromising.  Beyond a certain threshold, serial offenders–those who reappear before the courts for a third time–are dealt with severely by increasingly long prison sentences.  (Op cit., p. 34).

He then contrasts this with New Zealand criminal policies:

In New Zealand offenders with far more court appearances than three are frequently given community based sentences, which in theory are supposed to reform them, but in reality simply allow them to continue offending.  As a result crime in New Zealand is a staggering 15 times more prevalent than in Singapore. (Ibid.)

Over the lifetime of a career criminal there needs be times at which penology must have punishment as its primary focus; at others, rehabilitation; and, particularly when criminality becomes a settled mode of life, community protection must be paramount. This would mean that repeat offending, even for the same offence, would attract longer and longer more severe,  custodial sentences. 

Riddled with Corruption

 China Inc.

China is a corrupt country.  The ordinary Chinese citizen knows it.  Over the past five years the internet has been used as a vehicle to expose the corruption of Chinese government officials and functionaries.  The word is out.  The response of the Chinese government has been to attempt more stringent censorship of its own citizens.  A government that will not allow its citizens to speak freely is a government riddled with fear.  It fears the truth. 

To be fair, the Chinese government has attempted to crack down on the corrupt activities of government functionaries and officials.  But one suspects that the crackdown is more driven out of political opportunism: it presents an easy way to get rid of a political opponent, rather than a consistent fundamental drive for universal ethical standards.  China is a country where virtually everyone can be considered a lawbreaker at the whim of the state.
  It is only the state turning a blind eye which allows individuals to go into business to make profits and increase their wealth.  Should the individual fall foul of the state, there is a raft of laws, rules, and regulations which can be quoted from the statute books to indict the individual.  Permits to be in business can be revoked.  Property can be confiscated whimsically.  Consequently, prosecutions and indictments can be politically motivated.  

Therefore, anyone going into China to conduct business needs to be careful and wary.  When the melamine scandal eructated Fonterra found out that Chinese business partners and employees can be corrupt.  But Fonterra was in favour at court, so it was able to work through the problems and escape prosecution.  But smaller businesses cannot.  There are accounts out of Australia that Australian companies doing business in China have had staff indicted for corruption and subsequently imprisoned.  The charges and indictments had all the hallmarks of vindictive action from local officials and competitors, who were demanding bribes and commercial secrets and protection money. 

We have a recent account of a New Zealander who was involved in business in China, where businesses in that country were manufacturing components for his products in New Zealand.  On a business trip he got into a scuffle in a restaurant which turned into a nasty fight.  One of his assailants died and he was put into prison for five years for manslaughter.  This, from Stuff:

A Kapiti businessman locked up for four years in a Chinese jail has told of the “cruel” conditions he endured, including torture, beatings and forced labour.  Danny Cancian, now 46, was sentenced to five years’ jail for manslaughter after fatally kicking a man during a restaurant fight in 2008. He served four years of that sentence, most of it in Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China. 

The conditions he endured in jail tell us a great deal about China.  The way a country treats its prisoners and its criminals tells you a good deal about its culture and predominant philosophies and its dominant religion.
For all that time, he says he was unable to exercise, was kept in a cell with at least 18 other prisoners and subjected to violent discipline and solitary confinement.

He learnt quickly the horrors of isolation after a scuffle with a guard early in his sentence. “All the police came running in. They Tasered me and they beat me. Then I was put in isolation for two weeks.” Isolation was a three-by-one-metre cell with a hole in the floor for a toilet. From seven in the morning, he would sit there, arms and legs folded, unable to move.

“At nine o’clock they let you sleep, but then they wake you every 20 minutes.” When not in solitary confinement, he spent his days forced to work in a factory, making earphones for airlines.”Every morning at 5am they would march us all to the factory and at 7pm we would come back. If you don’t work you’ll get beaten, Tasered and pepper-sprayed and put in isolation. It gives me a lot of nightmares just thinking about what I went through.”. . . .

He has since told his story on YouTube, using handwritten placards that tell a tale of what he calls the real China. The placards include the words forced labour, long hours, beatings, Tasering, hunger, torture, sleep deprivation, pepper spray, no religion, little contact with family, chemical testing on prisoners, no human rights, suicide and death.

 The real China.  Not so, according to the Chinese Embassy, which issued this anodyne statement in response:

A spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in Wellington said: “The issue of basic rights for inmates is an important component of overall human rights in China. China has joined international human rights conventions that require signatory nations to fulfil relevant obligations that include the protection of rights for inmates.”

In the light of those requirements to which China has officially bound itself, will the Chinese government be investigating  Dongguan prison in the Guangdong province in southern China?  Will heads roll?  Or will bribes be exchanged?  Or will putting signatures on human rights conventions be as meaningful as all Chinese official signatures on agreements and pieces of paper: compliance is discretionary?  Now if a senior Chinese government official were to have it it in for some petty officials in Guangdong and wanted to make a point, then we may see an investigation and compliance.  But until then, not so much.

It’s the difference between a government above the law, or subject to the law.  It’s the difference between implicit totalitarianism and limited government.  It’s the difference between a people believing that the law is king versus the king above the law.  It’s the difference between a nation believing itself to be under the Living God versus a nation believing the nation itself is a god.  That, above all else, is why the Chinese government and Chinese governance is riddled with corruption.  That is why, increasingly, the same patterns are emerging in the West. 

Letter From America

Prisons and Sentencing

It appears that conservatives in the United States are starting to rethink crime and punishment in that country.  Christians are at the forefront, it seems–and not because they are soft on crime.  It’s because issues like the appropriateness of the punishment for the crime have come to the fore, as have issues over the ruination that prisons bring to young men incarcerated over small offences.

An historical parallel is not hard to find.  Witness the transportation of convicts to the Antipodes  for offences we now deem minor.  Throwing such people into prison because of a “zero tolerance” to crime has replicated the mistakes and injustices of  British justice in the nineteenth century.

Public Sector Prejudice

Prisons and Glass Houses

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones–at least that’s what we were gravely told whilst  learning social manners.  When we grew up we also learned that conflicts of interest are usually nefarious unless they are disclosed.  Both adages are relevant in the following case.

New Zealand has finally introduced private management contracts for some selected prisons.  The knee jerk reaction from hide bound statists (whose numbers are legion in this country) has been swift, predictable, simplistic and naive.
  Privately run prisons must operate at a profit.  This, we are told, creates two bad consequences.  Firstly, private prisons have a conflict of interest.  They benefit commercially from ever increasing prisoner numbers: therefore, they have little commercial incentive to be committed to rehabilitation and seeing prisoner numbers reduce.  Secondly, they are too expensive because they have to generate a profit.  This, in a state run prison, could be ploughed back into prisons, improving conditions and effectiveness. 

There are all sorts of emotive passions that swirl around also.  How grotesque, we are told, that someone would profit from the degradation and misery of other human beings. 

At the forefront of those making these specious arguments has been the union of state prison officers, the Corrections Association–primarily through the mouth of its president, Beven Hanlon. Of course Mr Hanlon and his members are now competing for jobs with the employees of private prison management firms.  His members, of course, are looking to profit from managing prisoners in the corrections systems.  Moreover, they implicitly benefit from unruly prisons, since they can argue for more staff, more resources, more money–including higher salaries. 

The Corrections Association is arguing the case against privately managed prisons from a deeply conflicted position. Unfortunately, it is a conflict not disclosed.  But a moment’s thought would tell even the most hide bound statist that Beven Hanlon and his members should not be the ones making the case against private prison management.  It’s like turkeys arguing against Christmas.  The conflicts of interest are substantial–but never disclosed publicly, and disclosure is never demanded by the media, which is telling. 

Secondly, Mr Hanlon has been foolish enough to pour scorn and scathing criticism upon our first privately managed prison because under its management, prisoners have escaped.  Mr Hanlon has publicly lectured Serco, the private management company, on its responsibilities and excoriated it for incompetence and slackness for allowing people to escape. 

But people that live in glass houses should not throw stones.  About a week later, two prisoners escaped from a prison run by Mr Hanlon’s union members.  Mr Hanlon’s silence has been deafening. 

But there is a world of difference in outcomes for the public in these two instances.  In the case of Serco it will be fined for non-performance of its duties, as per the terms of its contract.  In the case of Mr Hanlon his Association will sound the Oliver Twist argument:  more prison officers, more support staff, more facilities, more resources. 

And that, dear folks, is why prisons managed by private businesses provide an inherently better outcome, provided they are operating under a comprehensive management contract so that the management company has powerful financial incentives not only prevent escapes, but to achieve the required levels of rehabilitation and treating prisoners with respect and human decency. 

Our point is not that we know such contractual terms are functioning in our first privately managed prison but rather that the contractual regime can easily be adapted and negotiated to provide powerful incentives to achieve just such superior outcomes.  The alleged conflicts of interest evaporate, provided the management contract has been properly drafted. 

Redemptive Idols

Naive Simplistic Foolish Nostrums

Kim Workman: professing Christian, ex-bureaucrat, Maori, “largessee” of Helen Clark, and all round media “go-to” guy for issues of crime and punishment in New Zealand.

An interesting article on Kim has been published by Whaleoil  on his philosophy of prisons and prison “reform”.  (We  disclose at the outset our belief that prisons are blighted institutions, severely compromised in many ways.  However, there is nothing better to take their place right now.  So we had better make the best of it.)  Workman’s Christianity has apparently influenced his approach to crime and punishment.  He appears to believe that “loooooove” is the Great Redeemer of mankind.  When people commit crimes against persons or property it is to be condemned; to rehabilitate them, to prevent recidivism they must be loved.  In this Workman is simply not Christian.  According to him:

prison is a waste of time; that most if not all prisoners can be rehabilitated; and that love and a good dose of maoritanga and Christianity will be  more effective than anything else in preventing re-offending.

If this characterisation is true, Workman has elevated human “love” into an idol, perverting the Christian faith and the Gospel of God. 

Workman’s Maori connections are reflected in his belief that Maori crime really reflects social dislocations, not evil within the human heart.  Consequently, it is alleged that he maintains sympathetic connections with Maori criminal gangs.

Workman  is an apologist for gangs; in  his view, they are just another form of whanau. Presumably to support him –  but I suspect more  to intimidate the rest of us, including the audience – he arranged for a number of  members of the Mongrel Mob’s ‘Notorious’ chapter to enter the hall just as the debate began. They included rapist Mark Stevens, once known as the ‘Parnell Panther’, and most of them were masked with red bandanas.  The most obvious  effect was to frighten the audience so that half of them left  immediately for fear of violence – among them  two women of my acquaintance.

 Workman as bureaucrat was largely responsible for the introduction of his ideology of prison-rehabilitation into NZ prisons in the nineties.

So just who is Kim Workman? He is a former bureaucrat who rose to be Assistant Secretary – Penal Institutions in the early 1990’s. He is best known among criminologists as the architect of He Ara Hou,  a programme designed to rehabilitate recidivist offenders.

The programme was announced in July 1990. Among Workman’s many ideas was that prison officers should not wear uniforms or insignia denoting rank; inmates could wear what they liked; and  staff were encouraged to become “friends” with their charges. The whole ethos was to remove the “authoritarian culture” within prisons, and to develop instead  a “we are all  on this journey together” culture between staff and inmates.

While the programme operated, Many prison managers allowed “family days” when relatives and friends of prisoners could bring food into prisons and visit in a …ah…’relaxed’ atmosphere. In some cases staff and inmates formed friendships,  with staff informally signing signing inmates out for excursions such as fishing trips on the officers’ days off.

Prisons became holiday camps in the grand effort to redeem mankind.  The initial results were wonderfully encouraging, to the naive and simple-minded, and to any perverse intellectuals blinded with ideological hubris.  Nevertheless the Commentariat cheered:

The early results of He Ara Hou  were pleasing. A dramatic increase was reported in the numbers of inmates involved in educational programmes. Break out escapes fell [why would you need to break out of that environment!]. There was a decline in suicides. Interpersonal relationships between staff and inmates,  and  among inmates among themselves improved: (Newbold: ‘Another one bites the dust: Recent Initiatives in correctional reform in New Zealand’; in  2008  3 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology p. 384)

Did it last?  Well, no.  The prisons were “criminalised”: they became one vast state-funded criminal enterprise.

In the end however, the experiment was a disaster. Family days and the general relaxing of security left prisons open to the smuggling of drugs, money and other contraband, which flowed in unhindered. Close relationships between staff and inmates some times became corrupt and – surprise surprise – there were instances of sexual misconduct between female officers and male prisoners. There was an embarrassing series of scandals involving staff illegally trading with inmates, theft of department property, failure to supervise dangerous inmates and allowing them to escape, drug dealing and serious abuse of prisoners who were unpopular. At Mangaroa prison – set up as a showcase of the new enlightened methods – allegations of corruption, neglect and violence led to the firing of twelve officers, and court ordered compensation totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars to prisoners. (Newbold op cit. p.388)  In circumstances that are unclear, Mr Workman and the Department of Corrections parted ways.

Workman’s Maori connection, his compromised-Christianity,  and his high-flying bureaucratic career have all melded into an avoidable disaster–easily foreseen–except by those whose predilections credulously enticed them to believe and follow Workman’s prescriptions.  Thus spake most of the Commentariat.

When you are one of the champions of the said Commentariat and you lose your job apparently due to a brain-child programme that failed spectacularly one could expect to be shunned.  But no.  Helen Clark, then Prime Minister of New Zealand, believed far too much in Kim to let a good thing go.  Her administration began to fund an advocacy group run by Kim, called “Rethinking Crime and Punishment”.  Workman thus became Clark’s on-going mouthpiece on crime and punishment.  (Incidentally, this was a classic manoeuvre by the radically-left Clark.  When your real agenda is far too radical for the country–at present–you use taxpayers’ money to fund your mates and organisations into “non-political” pressure groups, to say what is far too radical for you to say, until the Commentariat picks it up, repeats it endlessly, and it becomes the new normal.)

And thus, Workman carries on his merry way, funded by Clark, go-to spokesman for the media on crime and punishment, endeavouring to build the new PC norm on criminals and criminality. 

How does Workman justify the failure of his rehabilitation of prisons?  His is the classic response: More Money, please. 

What he doesn’t do is talk about He Ara Hou, other than to use the well worn excuses that the funding for it wasn’t enough, that the programme wasn’t given enough time,  or that his ideas weren’t fully implemented. A bit like those who still argue that if only it was done properly, communism would be a resounding success.

Please note, ContraCelsum does not subscribe to the view that prisons should primarily be places of punishment.  They should facilitate restitution to the criminal’s victims.  We believe that de-humanising people is wrong.  Prisoners need to be treated with the respect due to human beings because they remain, however broken, in God’s image.  Prison should be hard, firm, but fair.  All crime–especially homosexual rape–needs to be driven out of prisons.  All gang affiliation and influence, likewise.  Prisons need to be transformed into places of hard, meaningful work that has an economic value applicable to the restitution of victims.  Crime needs to be re-defined as primarily an act which intends harm to persons and property.  All preventive, prohibition-like criminalising of substances, such as drugs, should be dropped. Abolish parole. Accept that human beings have a right to go to Hell in their own way.  And much, much more.

The challenge is complex.  The solutions need to be multi-faceted.  Workman’s naive simplistic foolish nostrums are risible.

Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Why Did New York City’s Crime Rate Drop by 80%?

A worthy article by Adam Gopnik on crime and punishment has been published in The New Yorker.  We will attempt a precis of the salient points.

Firstly, the size of the problem:  the penal system in the US is vast and racially biased. 

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Secondly, US prisons are brutal places.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

In our view, one of the most glaring flaws of the modern Western penal model is that it exists to give expression to contradictory principles of justice.  Consequently, the modern prison system fails because it society remains deeply confused about what success looks like.  Is the prison to be retributive–a place of vengeance?  Is is to be a place of penitence and restoration?  Is is for the protection of society–locking the crims up so they don’t continue to prey on the innocent? Is it a place of justice? 

Our world answers, All of the above.  That’s the problem.  No institution can succeed when its goals and objectives are so confused and contradictory. 

Thirdly, in the US in many cases the punishment seems out of all proportion to the crime.   The punishment of incarceration is often dehumanizing in the extreme.  The author quotes Charles Dickens’s reaction to seeing the conditions of solitary confinement in a US prison in the nineteenth century:

The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Solutions?  Doubtless the problem is complex–and the author makes a number of observations.  Crime rates have dropped substantially in the US over the past twenty-five years (by around 40 percent), and in New York in particular (which has experienced an 80 percent drop).  Some attribute this to zero-tolerance policing and longer, harsher prison sentences.  Not so fast, says Gopnik.

At least in New York a substantial reason why crime has dropped has been a change in policing tactics. 

In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Moreover, much more attention should be paid to a commensurate punishment–one that fits the crime.  Oftentimes, prison sentences fail completely in this regard.

. . . since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

Finally, Gopnik addresses the issue of drugs and the failed policies of prohibition.  

When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). . . .  The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

>How Marvellous are Thy Works

>The Power of Christ in the Dark Places of the World

It seems that many of today’s prisons are becoming places of Amazing Grace.  We heard Pastor Alistair Begg, of Parkside Church in Cleveland reading some letters to the congregation received as a result of the church’s radio ministry.  Several had come from prisoners.  One wrote:

I have been faithful in serving the Lord these last seven or eight years. I have been incarcerated now for over twenty years. As one brother put it, since I was arrested at 17, I know nothing of life.

I just finished listening to your study on the Father’s discipline, from 1998. I may not know much about life but I can agree with the Psalmist when he writes,

Lord you are my portion and my cup of blessing;
You hold my future.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
Indeed I have a beautiful inheritance.

This chap, is probably a lifer, and therefore likely to be a murderer. He may spend the rest of his life in prison. The same infinite power of the Holy Spirit which saved the thief on the Cross, causing him to be born again, in the most helpless and hopeless of circumstances, is blowing across the prisons. The wretched of the earth are becoming glorious citizens of the heavenly kingdom.

Similar testimonies and accounts can be heard from within our own prisons, here in New Zealand.

Chuck Colson has written an essay on the power of forgiveness.  In it he describes some of the amazing things he has observed as a result of prisoners becoming Christians.  God is good and glorious indeed.

>Rudders on the Prowl

>The Liberal Lion of Auckland Roars

OK, we consider ourselves thoroughly ticked off. We were just stupidly going along with the idea that prisoners ought not to be able to vote. It seemed reasonable. Paul Quinn’s private member’s Bill to that effect seemed like a sound common sense measure of retributive justice.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere Brian Rudman the liberal lion of Auckland dumped on us big time. He pilloried us for “inventing new and twisted ways of pulling the wings off prisoners”. How loathsome could we get? Clearly we needed to rethink our position.

We breathlessly began to look through Rudman’s indictment for coherent arguments against our naive and stupid opinion. First was a really trenchant ad hominen attack on people like us. Rudders pointed out that we were all elitist snobs who could not bring ourselves to think that our votes should rub up alongside the votes of criminals. Good one, Brian. That really hit the spot. Nothing like a bit of good old poisoning of the well to get people away from your opponents and rushing over to the side of the liberal lion. Clearly Rudders must have been paying attention when he was a neophyte in logic classes at his dear old Auckland University.

Sorry about the sarcasm. We are only imitating our opponent. Consider this for instance:

However, if former Treasury analyst Mr Quinn were to venture out of his economic textbooks, he might discover that a democracy based on universal suffrage is the form of governance that has evolved in countries of our kind, and that however much we might roll our eyes at some of the more odious views and actions of those we disagree with, it’s proved to be a more resilient, and fairer, system of governance than any other on offer.

Tut. Tut. Now, just to get this right. Universal suffrage democracy is the big deal. Any restriction, any disenfranchisement is a clear and present danger to democracy–the fairest government of them all. We know so; Rudders asks his magic mirror daily, and he tells us so. So, you see, disenfranchising prisoners is the thin end of the wedge: it is blasphemy, blasphemy, he tells us.

Well, Brian old chap, how about fourteen year olds, or three year olds for that matter? No, seriously. Answer the question. We just want to know whether you are willing to countenance any restrictions upon suffrage whatsoever. Is universal suffrage really universal, old boy? And if not, then presumably you will need to go through some ratiocinations to restrict voting to say, maybe, people eighteen and older. And as soon as you do–well, then, we need to urge you to get your head out of your ideological ostrich hole and just for once in your life learn that

a democracy based on universal suffrage is the form of governance that has evolved in countries of our kind, and that however much we might roll our eyes at some of the more odious views and actions of those we disagree with, it’s proved to be a more resilient, and fairer, system of governance than any other on offer.

Don’t you for a moment suggest, arrogant chap, that you can roll your eyes at the views of a child, as if somehow the political opinion of a child were not as good or sophisticated as your own. Sauce for goose and gander, old boy.

Next argument. Brian sententiously informs us that banning a prisoner from voting is arbitrary.

You cannot blanket ban anyone who crosses the prison door whether it’s one day or three years, because it’s arbitrary.

Arbitrary is bad. Blanket bans are bad. So they are on three year olds–and as for withholding the vote from a seventeen year old–cravenly arbitrary. “Arbitrary” would be where there is no rational selection in deciding who should have the vote. One would think that disenfranchising prisoners is anything but arbitrary: it is a clearly defined category, and one which self-selects. And it is hardly a blanket ban. It is a very specific and focused ban.

Ah, but who are we mere mortals to question the superior wisdom of the liberal lion of Auckland? We are backwoods rubes, after all. Let’s hasten to Brian’s next argument: he gets all worked up citing the expert opinions of the priests and priestesses at the temple of human rights.

The Human Rights Commission echoed this, calling “the right to vote in elections, without discrimination, … one of the most fundamental of human rights and civil liberties.” Arguing that people are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment, the commission said “disenfranchisement has no proven deterrent effect and it can actively undermine the ability of prisoners to engage constructively with the very society to which they will be released when discharged and, thus, their eventual social rehabilitation.”

People are “sent to prison as punishment, nor for punishment . . .” That has to be the most scintillating sophistry we have read in decades. Where do these people get this from? Look, just humour an old hayseed for a moment. Going to prison is a punishment, but you don’t go there to be punished? Wow. We never saw that one coming? You need to have a university degree to work that one out. Clearly removal of every freedom right in the book, and the suspension of virtually every demand right in the book is intrinsic to incarceration. Is that punishment, or not? Does it involve a suspension and removal of rights, or not? Well, of course it does. Even we dumb rubes who don’t have history degrees from the good old Auckland University can see that.

So the real question–and the one you have to argue to carry your case, old boy–is that voting rights need to be placed in a special category as being more important and more fundamental than every other human right which has been suspended and prorogued by virtue of being a prisoner. Now, we know why you don’t want to argue that–it would be a very, very difficult argument to mount. If imprisonment means anything, it means a suspension of rights. You can only carry the case if you prove that suffrage rights trump all those other rights which are lost when one is incarcerated.

Now, through the bluster and emoting, Brian does make an effort, in a sort of half-baked way. Again, citing his mentors, the Human Rights Commission, he parrots their idea that

The commission argued that “modern democracies are based on the concept that all people – including prisoners – have rights simply by virtue of their common humanity” and therefore, “to disregard their right to vote becomes a fundamental breach of the social contract”.

Dear me. Question begging is not an argument. What is at issue is whether prisoners have a right to vote. A mere assertion that modern democracies are based on the concept of prisoners being able to vote will hardly do. The issue is whether they ought they to be so based on such a concept. Dear Brian, while it may seem compelling to cite the Human Rights Commission it means nothing. You have to actually stand there and make an argument for the position–not just beg the question.

You are dealing with backwoods rubes, after all. We like to think things through–slowly, to be sure. We cannot keep up with your lightning fast brain. Make an argument, Brian. Don’t just assert. Until you do we will cling to old fashioned nostrums such as, maintaining the rule of law and social order is foundational to civil society and civil rights.

An incarcerated criminal, by definition, has acted to attack and undermine both civil society and the civil rights of others. A condign punishment is that for an appropriate time the criminal’s demand rights, freedom rights, and civil rights be removed by force by the state. The relevant principle of justice is that the one who undermines and attacks civil society and the civil rights of others should suffer withdrawal from the benefits of civil society and have his rights suspended. Justice therefore requires the suspension of voting rights of criminals during the time of their punishment. It is a grave injustice to allow voting rights for incarcerated criminals.

Your move, Brian.

>Life on the Inside

>Conrad Black’s Interesting Prison Portrait

Canadian publisher, Conrad Black is out of the pen. He was released on bond due to legal appeal processes now underway. He has continued, amongst other things, to write for the National Review. He gives us this discouraging reflection of the US prison system and the legislative paradigm in which it operates. It is a mess. This is not just a US problem. The root of it is bone-headed wrongness of the prison system as the model of criminal punishment per se.

Until governments come to understand that restitution to victims and those harmed must be the centrepiece of any criminal justice system (rather than a nice-to-have tack-on) we will not be able to build a more Christian system. The system should not be focused primarily upon punishment for the vast majority of criminal acts. Rather, it should exact restitution, not retribution. Once restitution has been completed, the perpetrator or wrong-doer is free–under no further obligation, except not to offend again. It is not a case of paying one’s debt to society, but to those harmed. (Incidentally, we believe that reforming the criminal justice system along enlightened, biblical lines will not occur until the overwhelming majority of people believe that ultimate justice lies in the hands of the Living God, the Judge of the heavens and the earth. Only then will man be willing to cede his claims to exact vengeance, and leave “room” for the vengeance of God.

But, back to Conrad Black’s account:

In my 28 months as a guest of the U.S. government, I often wondered how my time in that role would end. I never expected that I would have to serve the whole term, though I was, and am, psychologically prepared to do so, now that I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years.

Most evenings as a captive, I telephoned my wife, Barbara, at between 11 and 11.30 p.m., just before the telephones were shut down for the day. I did so on Monday, July 19. Her opening gambit was “What have you heard?” and I dimly replied “Nothing special.”

“You haven’t heard?”

Thus did I learn, as the emails had been down in the entire compound for five days, that my appeal bond application had been granted. Half an hour later, when I was in bed using my night light to do a crossword puzzle, two fellow residents approached, a few minutes apart, to say that they had heard of it on the BBC World Service.

Tuesday was a day of feverish to-ing and fro-ing, as bond was discussed and arranged, and terms debated, and the local personnel of the Bureau of Prisons strove to keep up with the paperwork as my status inched, line by line, on their computer screens, toward the gate.

As a matter of principle, I refused to pack up anything until I was assured of actually leaving. To pack up belongings and then have to unpack them would have been insufferably demeaning. I made only very cautious replies to inquiries about leaving “Soon, I hope.”

The court appearance to fix terms was in Chicago on the morning of Wednesday, July 21, where I was represented, with his customary agility, by my outstanding counsel, Miguel Estrada.

By prearrangement, I called my wife at shortly after 11 a.m. Again, she began “What have you heard?” “Nothing,” was my dynamic response, which surprised her, as there were already extended television accounts of the Chicago proceedings. “You leave today. Bail of two million dollars has been posted (by my dear and generous friend Roger Hertog), A car is coming to collect you at about 3. I’ll see you tonight.”

Barbara was in Toronto and it was our 18th wedding anniversary. She couldn’t make her reservation on Air Canada because she could see on television the driver she had arranged to pick me up marooned outside the gates of the prison complex. He had no authorization to prove he was ordered for me and not simply a ruse of the press. Faxes flew back and forth delaying her departure.

Finally, the only way to get to Palm Beach that night, just before midnight, which she was able to do, was to charter from a well-wisher at a knock-down rate, (basically the cost of aviation fuel), a very tired and sluggish medevac plane without a washroom.

In the Coleman Low Security compound, there are 1,800 residents and it is a little universe terminally addicted to gossip about the custodial system and especially the goings-on of the group confined there. By this time there were large numbers of journalists and photographers clustered at the gate of the Coleman complex and ongoing television coverage watched with some bemusement by my fellow residents in the television rooms of the residential units.

A steady stream of well-wishers from all factions of the compound came to say goodbye, as I put my books and papers and a few clothes items into cardboard boxes. (The only article of clothing that I took that was not among the few things I had bought myself was the nondescript brown shirt bequeathed to me when he left by the don of one of the famous New York gang families).

The Mafiosi, the Colombian drug dealers, (including a senator with whom I had a special greeting as a fellow member of a parliamentary upper house), the American drug dealers, high and low, black, white, and Hispanic; the alleged swindlers, hackers, pornographers, credit card fraudsters, bank robbers, and even an accomplished airplane thief; the rehabilitated and unregenerate, the innocent and the guilty, and in almost all cases the grossly over-sentenced, streamed in steadily for hours, to make their farewells.

Most goodbyes were brief and jovial, some were emotional, and a few were quite heart-rending. Many of the 150 students that my very able fellow tutors and I had helped to graduate from high school, came by, some of them now enrolled in university by cyber-correspondence.

Veterans of even 20 years in the federal prison system could not recall anyone being bailed in mid-sentence like this, and particularly not on the heels of unanimous Supreme and Circuit Appeals Court decisions.

I was overwhelmingly enthused to leave, especially in these circumstances, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s rewriting of the open-ended statute that had been used against me, a catchment, as the chief justice of the U.S. said at our hearing, for anyone a prosecutor takes against.

It had been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society. I saw at close range the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42% of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.) A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison, and the targeted substances are more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war.

I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one.

And I had heard the vehement allegations of many fellow residents of the fraudulence of the public defender system, where court-appointed lawyers, it is universally and plausibly alleged, are more often than not stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of clients they represent rather than for their level of success, and they do usually plead their clients to prison. They provide a thin veneer for the fable of the poor citizen’s day in court to receive impartial justice through due process.

And I had the opportunity to see why the United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), how the prison industry grew, and successfully sought more prisoners, longer sentences, and maximal possibilities of probation violations and a swift return to custody.

Before I got into the maw of the U.S. legal system, I did not realize the country has 47 million people with a criminal record, (most for relatively trivial offenses,) or that prosecutors won more than 90% of their cases. There, at Coleman, I had seen the courage of self-help, the pathos of broken men, the drawn faces of the hopeless, the glazed expression of the heavily medicated, (90% of Americans judged to require confinement for psychiatric reasons are in the prison system), and the nonchalance of those who find prison a comfortable welfare system compared to the skid row that was their former milieu. America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.

Of course, I was glad, jubilant, to leave, (though a return is not an impossible result of the pending rehearing), but also grateful for many of the relationships I had formed; enlightened by my observation of American justice on the other side of the wall; and happy to have got on well in an environment very foreign to any I had known before.

My departure was processed quite cordially and the personnel even conducted us to a back exit, through a padlocked gate, far from the media, and shook hands and waved as I slipped the bondage of the U.S. government. It had been 28 months and 18 days since I arrived. The send-off was more congenial than the reception and the ride back to Palm Beach was on the same roads over the same flat, scrubby landscape of strip malls and bungalows as the approach. It seemed more verdant and welcoming on the way back. The drive was contemplative and uneventful.

I was delighted to be back in my home, which the prosecutors had tried to seize for years. For the first time since I was last there, I enjoyed pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men. I had a glass of wine, and waited for Barbara, to celebrate the happiest of all wedding anniversaries.

National Post

>Prisons and Tobacco

>Going Up in Smoke

We have argued previously that in New Zealand, prisons and prison policy are an unholy mess. This is unlikely to change–at least in our lifetime–and probably not in several lifetimes. The fundamental reason for this intractable mess is that non-Christian societies have no sustainable foundation for justice. The bottom line is that non-Christian societies in general, and secular humanist societies (of which New Zealand is one) cannot settle upon any principle or dogma that defines justice per se.

It is all a big slough of shifting quicksand. Prisons are supposed to “deal to” criminals. But our society cannot–is unable–to decide whether this “dealing to” involves administering retribution, enforcing restitution, enabling rehabilitation, reducing crime, or protecting society from rapacious criminals. It end up running all these “lines” at the same time–and failing in all–since they are contradictory and work at cross purposes.

Moreover, our society has no basis to distinguish between sins and crimes: it ends up criminalising what ought not to be subject to the interdiction of the state, and decriminalising what ought to be. Abortion–a murderous act–has been decriminalised. Indeed it is propagated, supported, promoted, and funded by the state which is supposed to administer justice. On one hospital floor medical professionals will be exerting all their powers to save the life of a prematurely born baby. One floor above, they will be ripping a baby asunder and killing him or her. Confused? Inhumanly so.

On the other hand, the law of the land has criminalised acts of parental discipline of children but our Prime Minister has instructed the police not to apply the law. Confused? Ridiculously so.

Unbelief has no rational consistent criminal policy because it cannot define or settle the key issues attached to justice. It has no ultimate or absolute frame of reference–and as Sartre once said, a finite point, without an infinite reference point cannot have any definitive meaning.

So, in our society issues of justice, crime, and punishment comes down to whimsy around which a political consensus can swarm, albeit it fleetingly. So, one government administration will be committed to reducing the “crime rate.” Its solution will be to shorten prison sentences, expand parole, and increase non-custodial sentences so that fewer recidivist, hardened criminals will be forged like orcs in the caverns of our prison system. Then the public will become outraged; the pendulum will swing. A new administration will be elected which is committed to (you guessed it) reducing crime rates. But the solution this time will be longer sentences, harsher prison conditions, less parole. The real world becomes more like a parody of Monty Python every day.

We are currently in a “harden up, get tough on crims” phase. The Minister of Corrections, Judith Collins has announced that within a year smoking will be banned in prisons. True to our madding Monty Python world of “we know better than God,” four contradictory reasons have been advanced for this startling innovation: preventing prisoner access to dangerous materials (lighters, matches); making prison less palatable for prisoners (two thirds of whom smoke, we are told in a NZ Herald article); enabling prisoners to kick tobacco addiction–thereby achieving a nannying public health goal; and protecting prison officers from second hand smoke (in compliance with the law of tobacco free work places). This last reason is particularly a hoot, since the same Herald article tells us that half of corrections staff are smokers and the under the ban they, at least, will still be allowed areas where they can continue to smoke freely while at work.

So, which is it? What is the real reason for the change? All of the above? Which means none of the above. Our prediction? A very, very messy outcome. The unintended consequences will be huge. Bureaucratic boondoggles will abound. Last time we checked classified drugs were illegal in prison but drug use continues unabated. Now, tobacco is going to become a classified drug in prison, and two thirds of the prison population are addicted. Good luck with that one.

Let us ask a few simple questions: what has banning tobacco got to do with a person and his criminal act(s)? Nothing. Will it restitute the victim of the crime? Not at all. Is it an act of retributive punishment? Maybe, but the result is more likely higher smouldering anger and resentment. Will it help reduce recidivism? Nah.

Then, why is the government doing this again? The only understandable and defensible answer is to ensure compliance with the Smoke Free law. But if that is all it is (as we suspect is the case) the rest of the “reasons” advanced are smoke screens to appeal to other whimsies which float around our nation’s prison policy. But why the smokescreen? Because to focus solely on the Smoke Free law as the overriding rationale would be to expose that particular piece of nannying legislation to ridicule, and risk reasonable people beginning to call for that egregious extension of state power and interference to be modified or changed. And that would never do.

So, to “sell” the idiotic, let’s position it more in terms of public health, and more about what would be really good for prisoners in the long run. Prisons will be “framed” as the health and welfare reformatory to create the New Model Man. In anti-Christian societies, bad ideas get endlessly retreaded.

>Going, Going, Gone!

>Three Strikes Law

If some “experts” are to be believed, a terrible injustice is about to be foisted upon vulnerable victims. Criminals are going to be victimised by being inflicted with an 11,000 percent increase in their prison sentences. It has to be the case because the NZ Herald has told us so, via a febrile headline.

The government is about to pass a “three strikes” sentencing law. It will result, say the critics, in horrendous injustices. The idea is that if you are a repeat offender, committing multiple criminal acts, your sentences will become much longer. Now, there are three kinds of objections to this proposal. The first has to do with whether successive crimes receiving a progressive harsher penalty is intrinsically unjust. The second had to do with “unusual case” objections that result in manifest injustices. The third objection rests on unintentional consequences. We will deal with each in turn.

The burden of proof for those who argue that it is intrinsically unjust to punish successive crimes with harsher penalties rests firmly upon those who make the assertion. If a criminal repeats his offending after being punished for a crime, then to the second or subsequent crime, the evils of stubbornness and contumacy can be added to the subsequent acts. The subsequent crimes therefore become more blameworthy, bear greater guilt, and must be punished more severely. To argue against this would undermine the very notion of a scale of punishments due to the varied wickedness and seriousness of crimes.

The law of Moses recognises this principle when it codifies a crime of habitual criminality and attributes the most extreme sanctions against it. (Deuteronomy 21: 18–21)

Unusual case objections point to prima facie cases of injustice occurring under “three strikes laws”, such as where a succession of minor offences can result in life imprisonment for the third offence, albeit a petty infraction. Most of the sensational cases trumpeted in the Herald represent this second objection. Clearly this would be a concern.

However, to our mind, the New Zealand three strikes law overcomes these weaknesses–which unfortunately the Herald article neglected to mention, in its “never let the facts get in the way of a salacious story” kind of journalism.

In New Zealand, the three strikes law will apply to a stipulated set of crimes only–namely, those that are at the extreme end of offending. They will not apply to relatively minor criminal acts. According to Rodney Hide, leader of the ACT Party which has been the driving force behind the change:

The strike offences are listed. As a general rule the list comprises all the major violent and sexual offences that have a maximum penalty of seven years or more.

In other words, a petty criminal can be caught shoplifting three times, and he will not fall under the three strikes law. This approach avoids the risk of petty criminal acts being given extreme, and therefore harsh, sentences.

Moreover, the New Zealand three strikes law escalates the punishment for “strike offences” in a carefully graduated way, which means that a violent criminal will eventually suffer the maximum penalty laid down in law for that crime. (Note that this does not mean, as some assume, that the third strike will necessarily result in imprisonment for life.)

“An offender’s first conviction counts as Strike One. They will serve the sentence the judge sets and be eligible for parole. A conviction for a second strike offence will count as Strike Two. They will serve the full judge-given sentence – no parole. Subsequent offending will count as Strike Three – these offenders will serve the maximum sentence for their crime with no parole. The judge sentencing a Strike Three offender will have no option but to sentence the offender to the ‘max’ unless it would be ‘manifestly unjust’ to do so.

Note also that there is a discretionary override of “manifest injustice” which will be applied as well. It seems to us that the New Zealand version of the three strikes law has been carefully crafted and is manifestly just.

The third objection warns of unintended consequences. It is argued that it will fill the prisons. This is a non-sequitur. Prison space is non-finite. More prisons can be built. It is argued that criminals who are going to have serve the maximum sentence under law without parole will become more violent, because the carrot of early release is not available to them. This also is not an argument against the rectitude or justice of the three strikes law. If it is a risk at all it can be mitigated by more effective custodial practice.

Whether the current paradigm of serving time in a prison is the right way to punish and rehabilitate criminals is not at issue here. That is a different debate. The issue is whether the New Zealand “three strikes law” is inherently cruel, harsh, or unjust, or will result in unjust outcomes, or pernicious unintended effects.

We are pleased to say that none of these objections are sustainable. They either eviscerate the concept of culpability and degrees of criminality, or they misrepresent the new law through alarmist straw-man objections, or they raise irrelevancies.

This new three strikes law is change we can genuinely believe in.

>John Piper in Angola Prison

>“I was in Prison And You Came to Me”

According to Wikipedia,

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola and “The Farm”) is a prison in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Corrections. The prison is the largest maximum security prison in the United States with 5,000 inmates and 1,800 staff members. It is located on an 18,000 acre (73 km²) property that was previously the Angola and other plantations owned by Isaac Franklin in unincorporated West Feliciana Parish, close to the Mississippi border. . . . Current Warden Burl Cain maintains an open-door policy with the media, which led to the production of the award winning documentary The Farm.

Angola Prison, under the leadership of Warden Cain, encourages an active Christian ministry throughout the prison, which is actually one of the largest working farms in the US. Many of the prisoners are “lifers”: while not on death row, their prison sentences are so long, they will die in prison. Many prisoners have been converted. A mission training institute has been set up, and missionaries have gone from Angola into other prisons in the US to spread the Gospel amongst prisoners in other prisons.

In the video below, visiting Pastor John Piper conducts a 30 minute Q&A session with prisoners. The calibre of the questions would put many contemporary Christians to shame. When you consider the background of the audience you cannot but marvel at the wonder of God’s redeeming grace in Christ. God alone can do what man cannot do–save sinners.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>Running Prisons

>Is Judith Collins–or Anyone–Paying Attention?

It is hard to get a fix on how badly run our nation’s prisons are. We do, however, have an admittedly unreliable but steady diet of news reports of corruption and incompetence in running the prisons.

We have come across an excellent piece in City Journal by Heather MacDonald which reviews developments in prison management and administration in Rikers, New York. We commend it to all who are interested in penology and prison management. Here are some of the highlights:

The article focuses upon jails, as contrasted with prisons, or penitentiaries. The latter are institutions which house the sentenced. Jails, in US terminology, are more like our remand prisons. They are a seething mass of constantly changing populations. This presents huge management challenges. The implication is that if they can be managed effectively and well, then effective policies will apply equally well in prisons. The “population” problem is described as follows:

Jail administrators are obligated to get pretrial detainees back and forth to court on time and to keep them safe until their cases are completed. But pretrial detainees are just less than two-thirds of the nation’s approximately 780,000 jail inmates. The remainder consists of post-conviction defendants with a sentence of a year or less, who serve their time in jail; post-conviction defendants sentenced to more than a year and awaiting transfer to prison; parolees and probationers who have violated their conditions of release; illegal immigrants detained for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and inmates in transit between prisons.

These populations show up at all hours, often with no background information on who they are. Their turnover rate is extremely high: jails process as many admissions and releases in two months as state and federal prisons (which hold about 1.5 million inmates) process in a year. Managing that “churning mass of humanity” is a nightmare, says Jacobson, who now directs the Vera Institute for Justice. “So many arrestees lead unbelievably disorganized lives”—but as soon as they enter a jail, the jail becomes responsible for their well-being.

The first lesson being learned is the importance of gathering extensive data on each arrivee, and segregating them into appropriate groups and supervision regimes. Inmate classification is now being recognised as one of the most effective, cutting edge techniques in jail management.

Over the next few days, Rikers officials will try to gather as much information as they can on the men in the pen, seeking to determine how securely to house them and whether they need medical or psychological care. They will analyze their criminal records, intake questionnaires, medical examinations, and current behavior. Such inmate classification is the cutting edge of jail management. Jails are only now starting to recognize the importance of rigorously analyzing information to maintain order, just as policing has in the last decade. Some jails still practice “open bed” classification, housing an inmate wherever there is an empty bed or, at best, separating felony and misdemeanor pretrial detainees. But careful inmate classification acknowledges that a Mike Tyson in on a drunk-driving charge, say, is likely to be more dangerous than many a felony auto thief—and should be housed accordingly.

Secondly, New York with its zero-tolerance policing policies has, as one would expect, placed enormous pressure on the state’s prison system. The lesson is that you cannot have zero-tolerance policing–which is demonstrably effective in reducing crime–without a commensurate spend on the prison system, and a focus on high quality prison management. Zero-tolerance policing increases the complexity of prisons: if a nation is serious about crime reduction, then it has to put the hard yards in not just on the streets, but in the prisons as well.

The spread of quality-of-life policing, which targets low-level offenses like aggressive panhandling, public urination, and littering, has brought a more mentally unstable, troubled population into jails—one that mental hospitals would have treated before the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ’70s shuttered most state mental hospitals. In fact, jails have become society’s primary mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry out that role properly. Mental illness is much more common in jails than in prisons; at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental health services, a number that rises each year. “People are coming right off the streets with a whole range of street problems,” Jacobson reports. “You have to deal with them immediately and figure out: ‘Are you a dangerous lunatic, or just tough?’ ”

Thirdly, prison management must face up to the corruption of prison officers. Rikers has a zero-tolerance policy towards the smallest infraction of the rules by a prison officer with respect to prisoners. They have worked out that the overriding intent of prisoners is to get officers to make just one relaxation of rules: as soon as they do, they are “owned” by the prisoner.

The goal is to gain control of the officer. An inmate’s most potent method of corruption is to persuade an officer to break the rules for him. “Inmates know that once they get a corrections officer to do something for them, even if it’s just bringing them a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, they own the officer,” says Frank Straub, the police commissioner of White Plains, New York. It is illegal to bring an inmate so much as a stick of gum, as corrections officers learn from their first day in the academy. But there will always be a few officers who are turned by a skilled con man.
. . . . The results of any favoritism, even if it’s less shocking than bringing contraband to a cop killer, are disastrous for a jail. “When a corrections officer builds a relation with an inmate, the system starts to collapse,” says Straub, who has studied corruption in New York prisons. “The whole process is undermined.”

One wonders how our nation’s prisons would stack up on this principle? We fear the results of any examination.

Another critically important principle is the need to fight jail crime. The principles and practices of zero-tolerance policing have now been brought into the prisons themselves.

More important than visual surveillance is information-gathering. Just as the NYPD started debriefing every suspect it arrested in the 1990s to collect knowledge about unsolved crimes, progressive corrections officials recognize the need for grassroots information in fighting jail crime. “We teach our officers that the most important thing they can do is to listen to the inmates,” says Rikers deputy warden Hall. “Jot things down: Who’s Big Daddy, or Red-O? Feed it up the chain so we can figure out who’s running things, who the predators and victims are. When someone gives you information, be receptive; don’t shut it off.” The Kent County jail reports the information it gathers to the Grand Rapids Police Department—in 2008, 70 reports about unsolved crimes, including 23 homicides and six robberies.

Another principle is the development of “direct supervision” where prison staff constantly mix with prisoners, rather than supervising them by walking through cell blocks every five minutes out of sixty. The latter means that prison officers are the last to find out what is actually going on in the prison. It is effective to contain; it not effective at controlling and shaping the prison culture.

Despite the complexity of the officer-inmate relationship, an emerging philosophy of correctional design, “direct supervision,” seeks to break down the physical and psychological barriers between officers and inmates. In traditional prisons and jails, the corrections officer stays behind a barrier at a workstation, emerging only to make his rounds on a predetermined schedule, while inmates spend their day either in their cells or in a group dayroom. “It’s difficult to manage behavior under such conditions,” says Demory, “because for 59 minutes of the hour, the inmates control the turf.” The traditional design’s passive management style is good at containment but not at shaping the culture, he adds.

. . . . In a direct-supervision facility, by contrast, when inmates congregate out of their cells, the corrections officer is in the same space, either at an accessible workstation or circulating among them, like a community-policing cop walking his beat. The objective is to break down any distinction between the territory of inmates and of officers; the officer is supposed to talk with inmates, set the tone, and intervene immediately in predation and misbehavior.

The direct-supervision model has had impressive results in managing one of Rikers Island’s most difficult populations. A few dormitories of the adolescent jail are devoted to a program in which officers engage constantly with detainees to try to encourage self-control and respect for authority.

Another key principle is “place based management” where prison staff take responsibility for everything that happens “on their watch.” They are not allowed to blame bad events upon “the system”.

Direct-supervision theory is evolving further in the direction of community-policing concepts. “Place-based management,” for instance, teaches officers to think of themselves as owners of the housing units they supervise. They’re accountable for everything that happens on their watch, just as a community-policing officer should feel responsible for what happens on his beat. Too often, says Demory, who trains jail officials in the concept for the National Institute of Corrections, “if a fight breaks out, the officer thinks, ‘They’re just fools,’ rather than, ‘I’m the manager. How did that happen?’ ”

Finally, the article points out that Rikers and other enlightened prisons have had to get rid of the influence of the prison lobby groups.

The challenges of running jails exceed anything that the academic world—and most of us—can begin to understand. In addition to the huge problems of logistics and safety that jails present on their own, commissioners also face a well-organized inmates’ rights lobby that fights commonsense antiviolence measures. Until recently, for example, New York City officials weren’t allowed to put pretrial detainees in uniform, which made detecting contraband more difficult. Only last year did Commissioner Horn win the right to monitor detainees’ phone calls. Adolescents arrive at Rikers with their criminal histories largely concealed from officials to protect their privacy, hindering the determination of their security risk.

The conclusion:

The recent insights of urban policing—that order matters, that small violations lead to greater crimes, and that information must be gathered and analyzed—are all equally pertinent to jails, where chaos and corruption always threaten.

Here, we believe is a way forward for the NZ prison system and the Department of Corrections. There is a growing body of evidence that a welcome, albeit unintended consequence of running prisons in the Rikers way is that recidivism reduces. There is a great lesson here for any prepared to learn it: if you run prisons with the objective of reducing re-offending, you will fail. If you run them with the objective of intensively managing prisoners, requiring constant interaction with guards, refusing to tolerate excuses or rationalisations for illegal behaviour, criminals end up being less likely to offend. Why? Because they are being treated like responsible human beings by responsible human beings: firmly, fairly, and with a no-excuses dignity.

To make the necessary changes will take strong political and public leadership. It will require a significant increase in the public spend on prisons. It will take a prodigious investment in training prison officers.

Oh, but we forgot. Such enlightened prison policies have come out of zero-tolerance and community based policing strategies. They are an extension of those policies from the community to the prison. Both work. In NZ we have not even got to first base on the policing side of the game.

>Mixed Emotions are the Required Response

>Clayton Weatherston

The blogs have been sizzling and the airwaves have been reverberating over the Weatherston trial and verdict. There have been many aspects commented upon. The issue of provocation as a defence has been prominent.

The Government’s signal that it will remove it as a defence (at the recommendation of the Law Commission) is troubling. It is a sound adage that extreme cases do not make a solid foundation for good law. Madeleine offers some thoughtful criticism of this move–although the Law Commission assures us that provoking circumstances can be accommodated in the current sentencing flexibility available to judges.

Questions have been raised about the mental state and wellbeing of Weatherston. Macdoctor argues that the case illustrates the need for more use of forensic psychiatric facilities. Zen, in his inimitable style, had extended the justification of provocation to all kinds of quixotic public behaviour–a post which we found–well–provoking. Zen gravely informs us that the defence of provocation should be referred to as “Clayton’s defence”.

Moving from the satirical we have also been confronted with outpourings of invective, disgust, and vituperation against Weatherston from many quarters. Today the newspapers are carrying stories of crims within prison putting a bounty on Weatherston’s head; some are calling that fair justice.

Still others have expressed repugnance at the idea of retributive punishment and vengeance within the penal system–particularly after the recent speech by the Chief Justice questioning the utility and effectiveness of longer prison sentences. And so it goes on.

There are a few issues which go to the heart of the prevailing religion in any society. The dominant theory of the day of crime and punishment is one of them. Here you will find on display society’s systems of ethics, its register of what it considers extreme sins, and its principles of justice, crime, and punishment. In the court house and what is subsequently inflicted upon the person of the convicted criminal you will find religious belief writ large.

It is also an area where you will find some of the starkest contrasts between the Christian faith and Unbelief. In the first place, Jerusalem resiles from invective, disgust and vituperation against the person of the criminal. Believers are pervaded with a deep sense of personal and corporate depravity which sees every guilty criminal as a potential mirror. The story is told of the Puritan watching someone being marched to the gallows who bowed his head and said, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Believers know that they can never say (at least truthfully) that they are so good that there are some crimes and despicable acts they could and would never, ever commit. Given the “right” circumstances and enticements every Christian knows that they would be capable of any and every bad thing–at least if they are walking in the light.

Moreover, Christians know and believe that all humans bear the image of God Himself–and therefore even the worst criminals must be treated with appropriate respect condign to their being an image bearer. Therefore, outpourings of contempt, vituperation, and hatred are inappropriate and unacceptable.

Furthermore, Jerusalem knows and understands that vengeance upon evildoers has been claimed by God as His exclusive preserve. Society is expressly prohibited from taking vengeance upon criminals. “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'” (Romans 12: 19) This undergirds all Christian justice, all Christian penology.

Vengeance will be taken, both in the life and the one to come, but it has been laid down for us that it is a realm exclusively reserved by God. This means that all justice, courts, decisions, and policy toward criminals is seen not as elements of public policy, but first and foremost as divine acts. Within Jerusalem, when a criminal is judged and punished in the manner commanded by God Himself, it is seen as a divine action not the will, act, or behest of the creature. In matters of crime and punishment, we obey; we do not command.

Further, for Christians capital punishment and the death penalty as the most extreme and final punishment in this life is accepted and submitted to because God, to Whom alone belongs vengeance and retribution, has stipulated it, and laid it down.

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behaviour, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, and avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil.
(Romans 13: 3,4)

Finally, Jerusalem knows that there is an important element of prevention which plays out when the system of crime and punishment is biblically grounded and understood to be the preserve of God Himself. Part of the actual effect of righteous justice is to lead people to fear to do wrong. Evil acts have consequences that are fearful.

We are thankful that we have a justice system in New Zealand that works, albeit imperfectly, inconsistently, and in part–despite it being terribly flawed. We are thankful that crimes such as murder are still regarded as criminal acts and criminals receive retribution and punishment, at least in some degree. However, our gratitude is always tinged with sadness and fear–lest we too fall into evil.

We cannot endorse in any sense whatsoever the idea that a criminal may deservedly suffer harm at the hands of other criminals in our prison system. The moment we do is the moment we, mere creatures, have claimed vengeance for ourselves. At that moment the foundations of justice itself have gone.

>More Evidence of Prison Corruption

>Judicial Hypocrisy

New South Wales has just completed what is claimed to be the most comprehensive survey in history of prisoners within that state’s prison system.

It reports: “One in six inmates was aware of a sexual assault in jail in the past year, one in three had used drugs on the inside and half of inmates considered it ‘easy’ to get them.”

If we were to ask how many prosecutions have taken place for sexual assaults or drug use in prisons, we would doubtless find the number to be cuddling zero. Once again this highlights the bankruptcy of the prison institution and of the state in its approach to it. (We believe that it is safe to assume that prison life in NSW is roughly equal to reality in New Zealand.)

So, in this most vicious and degrading manifestation of modern slavery, which is the prison system, we are apparently justified in concluding:

1. That sexual assault and prison rape is OK. It’s a crime outside, but inside it’s tolerable and tolerated.

2. That drug use in prison is OK. It’s a criminal activity outside, but inside, it’s OK.

If we are not entitled to draw these conclusions, then why aren’t the police and corrections staff investigating and prosecuting crime within the prison system? Clearly they are not, or they must be the most inept and ineffectual policing ministries imaginable. Here is a captive population; accessible at all times to police detectives and investigators; susceptible to infiltration by undercover officers–the list goes on. Surely it’s not that hard.

So, since the police are clearly neither inept nor ineffectual in their professional duties, the only other possible alternative is that the government is willing to tolerate crime in prison.

We call for a zero tolerance policy toward all crime committed within prisons. If society and the government and the electorate is going to continue with the modern prison system, it has to front up and do it properly, justly, ethically, and fairly. Winking the eye at prison crime is none of these. It remains an enduring shame and blight upon the community. The government is being derelict in one of its fundamental and most basic duties.