New Zealand: Church leaders call for review of criminal justice system
Jun 02, 2011
From the article by the Episcopal News Service:
Anglican church leaders in New Zealand are urging politicians to set up a special commission to investigate the country's criminal justice system.
The move follows a remark by the Deputy Prime Minister Bill English that "prisons are a fiscal and moral failure."
Archbishops David Moxon and Brown Turei – along with the Anglican Social Justice Commissioner, the Rev. Anthony Dancer – fully agree with English's view.
They suggest politicians can build on English's remarks by: setting up a criminal justice commission to provide independent advice to the government; taking a non-political, bi-partisan approach to those issues; and systematically investigating alternatives to jail, such as restorative justice.
...In their call for a review of the criminal justice system, the Anglican leaders also draw attention to a paper released last year by mainstream churches, titled "Reducing Fiscal Pressures in the Justice System."
"The New Zealand criminal justice system is currently facing a watershed moment in its history. The criminal justice policies of the past 10 years have produced a situation that is no longer socially or economically sustainable. The prospect of spending an additional $1b in the criminal justice system over the next four years is more than this nation can currently contemplate," the introduction to the paper reads.
"Over the past 10 years, our prison population has increased by 53.5%. Penal policies over the past two decades have created a prison system that is too big to fail. To keep it safe and in good working order requires constant feeding – taking essential resources from other Government agencies – and interventions to more effectively prevent offending or reoffending. Yet our prison system is still unable to provide the focused interventions that are needed. It is therefore also a system that is too big to succeed."
The archbishops and Dancer say that a criminal justice commission could look at innovative approaches to justice, including alternatives to imprisonment.
"For example, restorative justice, supported by the judiciary, has demonstrated positive outcomes for offenders and their families/whanau. We know that prisons do not work for all offenders and that incarceration does not deter. Longer sentences do not mean a reduction in reoffending; rather they increase the likelihood of reoffending," they say.
"We need a criminal justice system that reduces criminal behavior and offending from an early age. We want victims of crime to feel honored, heard and respected and to see that justice is being done. We also want people and communities to feel safe and empowered to hold people accountable for their actions."
The church leaders support a statement by Kim Workman, director of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment project, that the criminal justice system "should be principled, pragmatic, evidence-based, cost-effective, efficient and outcomes-based."
Such a system will not be achieved without political courage, the leaders add.
Read the full article.
victims, rehabilitation
Recidivism may be the only therapeutic process there is: to make sure that perpetrators of crimes know they will be arrested and incarcerated no matter how stubborn, how habitual they are, no matter how many times they offend and injure and victimize, to know that justice, not they, will prevail. The rate of recidivism diminishes with each application of sentence/justice.