Jarrod Gilbert: More prison beds needed but they aren’t the long-term answer to crime

OPINION

The Government last week announced that it is increasing funding for the Department of Corrections to build an additional 600 prison beds at Waikeria Prison. It’s the right decision.

The funding announcement itself
was an unfortunate shambles. Neither the Minister of Corrections nor the Prime Minister seemed to know the numbers of, well, anything. And even a hasty clarification sent out after a press conference still left numerous questions unanswered.

While the press conference was much talked about, it’s a sidebar to something more interesting: that we are in an identical situation as we were in 2018. The only difference – and it’s an important difference – is the way we’re viewing it.

In 2018, the recently elected Labour Government inherited a plan to build a mega prison at Waikeria. It was to be 1500 beds in total, and the cost was more than $1 billion. It didn’t like the cost and there was uncertainty as to what to do.

I wrote in the Herald at the time that the build was unfortunate but necessary. The prisons were full and the forecasts showed the prison population was set to climb. There was no choice.

The same is entirely true now.

The Government must build beds, because we are once again going to reach capacity as the prison population is steepling, and that will only continue.

The situations between 2018 and now are not just identical, the response borrows from quite literally the same plan.

The Labour Government pared back the 2018 proposal at Waikeria and built only about half the beds in the original plan. When they did that, though, they were wise enough to build the infrastructure requirements of the original, bigger, build so the prison could be added to easily using the original plan. And this is exactly what the current Government is doing.

When I wrote that the 2018 prison build was necessary, I was sharply criticised by left-wing academics and activists. At that time, prisons were out of favour.

National’s Sir Bill English had derided them as expensive failures and much of the public discussion centred around how high New Zealand’s prison population was compared to other Western countries.

Oh, how the mood has changed. Prisons are back in vogue and seen as a bellwether of success on a renewed law-and-order crackdown.

The window of opportunity, in which a different approach to tackling the issue of crime that was open for a half dozen years or so, is well and truly closed. In large part, this is because the previous Labour Government had enthusiasm of intent to move away from incarceration, but they failed to sell an alternative. The reason they couldn’t sell an alternative is that they never formulated one.

Yet the arguments against prisons still hold. In a nutshell, they are incredibly expensive yet they do little to rehabilitate people. Most importantly, however, they don’t address future generations of offenders. Those kids who are ram-raiding will cycle through our prisons for years to come.

Until a long-term, intergenerational, preventative plan is devised and agreed to, we are on a hiding to nothing.

The current Government has vaguely spoken about social investment – which, in one shape or another, is needed – yet there was nothing in their 100-day plan or their extended plan. In fact, they have no discernible plan at all. In the absence of that, we are just returning to what we’ve always done, and something that didn’t work in the past and won’t work in the future.

Both the National and Labour Governments have, and continue, to dance to a similar tune in building prisons.

They should be planning to get ahead of crime instead of trying to belt it from behind.

At-risk young kids growing up in obnoxious criminogenic conditions, either in their homes or in state care, ought to be the focus. This is a moral as well as an economic imperative.

We must steer vulnerable and innocent kids away from criminal socialisation and allow them to thrive and to grow into good, healthy adults who pay rather than consume taxes.

This is so blindingly obvious, but it doesn’t score points on the hustings – and the length of time it will take to see results, as those kids enjoy moving into jobs rather than prison, is anathema to three-year political cycles.

Given that, the only certainty is that by the time the new beds at Waikeria come online, we will need to build more. And whichever party rules the roost, either National or Labour, will have no choice but to construct them.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.