Crime And Punishment: Professional Dreams versus Political Realities.

Lock Them Up: Kiwis simply rebel at the idea of being driven blindly by forces they cannot control. Nor will they accept the pain and suffering of their neighbours as statistically inevitable. Shit may happen – but that doesn’t mean the ratbags who make it happen should be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions.

THE TWO BIG QUESTIONS when it comes to crime and punishment, law and order, are: “Why do people commit crimes?” And: “What should we do with them when they do?” On how a majority of voters answers those two questions will depend the overall thrust and purpose of New Zealand’s criminal justice and correction systems.

The answer given by most New Zealanders to the first question is simple and direct enough to make sociologists, psychologists and criminologists wince: “Because they are bad people.” The public’s response to the second question, as unequivocal as the first, is: “Lock them up.”

The professionals like their compatriots’ answer to the second question even less than the first.

Their explanations for criminal offending are multifaceted and complex – as are their recommendations for what do about it.

In practical political terms, however, the complexity of the problem is the professionals’ worst enemy.

Sociologists, psychologists and criminologists are trained to view criminal behaviour scientifically, as a series of predictable responses to a range of exhaustively researched and clearly identifiable stimuli. Look into the background of just about any criminal, they argue, and you will find at least one, and in many cases, all of the following causal factors: acute parental inadequacy; childhood trauma; interrupted schooling; functional illiteracy; intermittent employment; substance abuse and/or addiction and mental illness.

Criminal behaviour, driven by these causal factors, they argue, is almost impossible to prevent. Their reasoning presents the criminal as a helpless cork tossed about on a wild torrent of malign environmental forces over which he or she exercises no control whatsoever. By this reading, criminals are not bad people. They are, rather, people who’ve had bad luck.

That being the case, the mission of the criminal justice and correction systems should have just two principal objectives. First: to protect the rest of society from further harm by identifying, apprehending and then isolating the most serious criminal offenders in specialised institutions. Second: to initiate rehabilitative measures designed to eliminate the worst manifestations of each individual offender’s dysfunctional personal history.

The great problem with this approach is that it regards the victims of crimes committed by serious offenders in much the same way as military commanders regard the death and injury visited upon non-combatants during military operations: they are “collateral damage”. Contemporary society, like contemporary warfare, runs this argument, cannot avoid generating an irreducible amount of carnage. Inevitably, there will be people who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is sad, but it is also unavoidable.

All of which may be true, but for most New Zealanders it simply will not do. The pain and suffering inflicted by serious criminal offending cannot be shrugged-off with an academically tricked-out version of “shit happens”.

The essence of the New Zealand character is embodied in the idea that individual Kiwis make their own luck. Every New Zealander knows someone who, through sheer grit and determination, has risen above the terrible circumstances of their upbringing and made something of themselves. Who did it on their own. And if people are able to do good on their own, then it stands to reason that they must also be able to do evil on their own. It’s why New Zealanders’ patience with social, psychological and criminological science is so notoriously thin. Kiwis simply rebel at the idea of being corks. Nor will they accept the pain and suffering of their neighbours as statistically inevitable. Shit may happen – but that doesn’t mean the ratbags who make it happen should be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions.

New Zealand’s new Justice Minister, Andrew Little, persuaded by the professionals, has set his face against his fellow citizens’ answers to the questions of crime and punishment, law and order. He has looked at the burgeoning number of people incarcerated in our jails, and he is saying that it simply will not do.

He does not want to press ahead with the planned billion-dollar, 3,000-bed super-prison at Waikeria. He and his party would rather reduce New Zealand’s prison muster by 30 percent.

The lawyer in him rebels against the idea that our current bail laws have remanded upwards of 3,000 Kiwis – all of them innocent until proven guilty – to months after soul-destroying months in custody.

The professionals are cheering him on. They want him to put in place a criminal justice and correction system guided by the scientific evidence – not the atavistic urges of the public.

Alas for Mr Little and the professionals, the questions of crime and punishment, law and order, are only rarely resolved through reasoned and dispassionate discussion. Like the Almighty, in Book of Genesis, the electorate demands answers from the Cains who live among them:

“What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 February 2018.

Behind Prison Walls

Signal Failure: Following the change of government in 2008, the "model" Spring Hill Correctional Facility’s inmate muster went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Under-resourcing in New Zealand's prison system is not confined to Serco's privately-run facilities, it afflicts the public prisons as well.

 

MAKING MONEY out of locking people up. How would you do it? Presumably, by making sure that the costs of looking after prisoners never amounted to more than the income you received for imprisoning them. In a more brutal society than ours, this would be easy. Those convicted of crimes could be sent to dank, dirty prisons, fed on slops, and allowed to die as Nature ordered. Very few staff would be required, and very little money need be spent. Provided none of the prisoners escaped to harry and harm the public, only a handful of simple-minded do-gooders would ever want to know what goes on behind prison walls.

 

The problem with making prisons profitable in today’s world, however, is that the State has an internationally mandated duty of care towards all incarcerated persons. Regardless of whether a prison is publicly or privately run, its inmates have rights that must be acknowledged and enforced by the people in charge. Unfortunately for profit-seekers, human-rights cost lots of money.

 

For those seeking to make a profit out of prisons, the challenge is, therefore, to present the State with a plausible plan for upholding the inmates’ rights, while surreptitiously cutting the institutions’ running-costs to the bone. Obviously, this requires a large measure of collusion on the part of the State. There will, accordingly, be plenty of scrutiny of the plans for rehabilitating their inmates, but very little, if any, of the budgets showing how these will be paid for. Likewise, the State will give lots of publicity to the private prisons’ promises; but none at all to their actual performance.

 

Why would the State collude so blatantly with private sector incarcerators? The explanation, sadly, is the same as the private sector’s: to make a profit. Except, the State doesn’t call what it does “making a profit”. It’s preferred term is “achieving a surplus”. In brute, political terms: it reduces expenditure on the prison system, which the public doesn’t like, in order to free-up funds for spending on things the public does like – such as schools and hospitals, or tax-cuts.

 

It requires a very strong-minded government to push back against this kind of political logic. A government determined to uphold its duty of care to prison inmates – even in the face of concerted public opposition. Rather astonishingly, in the light of recent events, New Zealanders elected such a government just 16 years ago.

 

Matt Robson - Minister of Corrections 1999-2002

 

In the Labour-Alliance Government of 1999-2002, led by Helen Clark and Jim Anderton, the Minister of Corrections was a man named Matt Robson. As a lawyer, Mr Robson knew a thing or two about the shortcomings of our prison system. Indeed, he is reported to have said that the best thing that could happen to Auckland’s dank and dirty Mt Eden Prison would be for it to be bulldozed flat. Sadly, that did not happen. What Mr Robson did do, however, was order the construction of Spring Hill Prison in North Waikato.

 

Spring Hill was to be a model, state-owned and operated prison for a maximum of 650 inmates. Each prisoner was to have his own cell, and the institution’s commitment was to rehabilitation through education and skills acquisition. The collapse of the Labour-Alliance Government, in 2002, brought an end to Mr Robson’s short stint as Minister of Corrections. He left Parliament in 2005 – two years before the Spring Hill Corrections Facility finally opened.

 

A year later, in 2008, a much more conventional Minister of Corrections was appointed to oversee New Zealand’s prison system. Judith Collins, like so many of those who had come before her, was determined to reduce expenditure on, and improve the efficiency of, the business of locking people up.

 

It was Ms Collins who contracted the global conglomerate, Serco, to manage the Mt Eden Corrections Facility. She was also responsible for the “double-bunking” of prisoners nationwide. This decision, bitterly criticised by inmates and criminologists alike, was seen as a sure-fire means of increasing prisoner stress levels through institutionalised over-crowding. The Spring Hill facility’s inmate muster, for example, went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Mr Robson’s “model” facility lay burned and broken.

 

The unfolding scandal at the Serco-managed Mt Eden Corrections Facility, while shocking, is only one aspect of the under-resourcing crisis afflicting our entire prison system. Yes, the privately-run facility is chronically under-staffed. And yes, the State does appear to be covering-up some of its deficiencies. But many of our state-run prisons are equally under-resourced. The State’s duty of care is being called into question on a daily basis – in both the public and private sectors.

 

As citizens of a civilised nation, we have a duty to care about what is being done, in our name, behind prison walls.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 July 2015.

Phillip Smith/Traynor: The Triumph Of Expert Foolishness Over Ordinary Wisdom.

Dangerous Knowledge: The tempting proposition that mere mortals can acquire mastery over Good and Evil is as old as the book of Genesis. But, what the experts and professionals of our supposedly meritocratic society appear to have forgotten, and what every ordinary person understands, is that the Devil lies. And, as Phillip Smith/Traynor discovered long ago, it is the person most determined to do good who is most easily deceived.

 

THE BUREAUCRATIC STUFF-UP that sped Phillip Smith/Traynor on his way to Chile, Brazil, and from there, thankfully, into the handcuffs of the Brazilian Federal Police, has exposed one of the most perilous fault lines in New Zealand society.

 

On one side of the fault line stand the experts and professionals. On the other, ordinary New Zealanders: the laity.

 

In the modern meritocracy New Zealand believes itself to be, expertise and professionalism are supposed to trump the layperson’s “instincts”, “gut feelings” and “common sense”.

 

Like the priests and the pastors they have largely superseded, experts and professionals lay claim to specialist knowledge of the world. Their mastery of the modern, “scientific”, method of explaining the universe means that, all other things being equal, the judgement of the expert and the professional is supposed take precedence over the traditional prejudices and ignorant superstitions of “ordinary people”.

 

But, Phillip Smith/Traynor’s scandalous escape from custody will, almost certainly, turn out to have been facilitated by the judgements of the experts and professionals employed by, or contracted to, the Department of Corrections. Indeed, it is already pretty clear that had the advice of those ordinary New Zealanders caught up in the multiple tragedies of Smith’s offending been heeded, he would never have escaped from custody.

 

Ordinary people recoil in horror and disgust from the criminal acts for which Phillip Smith/Traynor was convicted.

 

Their instinctive response is the same as that of any social animal confronted with a deadly threat to the survival of its young: kill it if you can, or, if that proves impossible, drive it from your midst.

 

The gut-feeling of non-expert, non-professional New Zealanders is that the likes of Peter Smith/Traynor are irretrievably evil. As killers, abusers, manipulators and deceivers they must never, ever, be believed or trusted.

 

The common sense of ordinary Kiwis tells them that, if the possibility of judicial error requires them to rule out the hangman’s noose, then murderers and paedophiles should simply be locked up forever.

 

What part of “predatory child abuser” and “vicious murderer” do the Department of Corrections' experts and professionals not understand?

 

From the perspective of the experts and professionals, however, the judgement of ordinary Kiwis is as flawed as it is unjust. Paedophilia is a pathological condition over which the paedophile exercises little, if any, control. The proper, scientific, response to child abuse and abusers is, therefore, therapeutic – not punitive.

 

Human behaviour is not immutable. It can be modified, reoriented and, with the right sort of interventions, re-programmed. It is simply not necessary to lock up serious offenders in a cage and throw away the key. To the psychologists, counsellors and therapists at Corrections, Phillip Smith/Traynor was a suitable case for treatment.

 

But, as Smith/Traynor’s extraordinarily successful deception of his psychologists, counsellors and therapists makes chillingly clear, it was the experts’ and professionals’ judgement that was flawed.

 

Yes, with enormous effort and the deployment of a host of (scarce) resources, it might just be possible to wrap a paedophile around with sufficient protective layers to make his release from custody a viable and safe option. And, in the best of all possible worlds, that’s what our Justice System would attempt to do.

 

But, this is very far from being the best of all possible worlds. The wraparound option does not exist in New Zealand. So why, in its absence, did Smith/Traynor’s expert and professional team keep behaving as if it did? Was it because Smith/Traynor, understanding to perfection their deep emotional investment in the possibility of his behavioural redemption, encouraged them to construe his “model prisoner” charade as proof that they had, already, redeemed him?

 

Phillip John Smith aka Phillip Traynor: Irretrievably evil?

 

If that is, indeed, what happened, then I’m afraid you’ll have to put me down with the traditionally prejudiced and the ignorantly superstitious. A person capable of pretending to be rehabilitated, while all the time embracing the perversity he’s claiming to have vanquished, is evil personified.

 

The besetting sin of the expert and professional is their hubristic belief that everything in nature can and should be brought under human control. Like Adam and Eve, tempted in Eden with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they have fallen for the Devil’s fatal pitch: “In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

 

All ordinary people know that the Devil lies.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 November 2014.