Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Priorities

The government is going to spend an extra $500 million on 1,000 police.

Given the amount of offending that occurs before we lock criminals up and the level of re-offending that occurs when we let them out, wouldn't we be better using the half billion on the justice system and prisons? After all, the stated aim here is reducing the number of victims.

My understanding was (some years back) that police demoralisation was largely about delivering criminals to a court system which returned them to the community.
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9 comments:

Craig Ranapia said...

And one has to ask where exactly are these thousand new Police going to come from. Unfortunately, perhaps, Star Wars is fiction and you can't just order a thousand clones of Temuera Morrison. :)

4:09 PM
Anonymous said...

Also, attrition is about 300 police a year, so 1000 "extra" police in 3 years as "promised" by the Government only goes to replace attrition - they are hardly EXTRA.

5:08 PM
Anonymous said...

Hmm. Prisoners are quite expensive to keep behind bars, I think a more quantitative assessment would be needed.

6:19 PM
Anonymous said...

Furthermore it would probably be best to be generous in estimating the total cost of keeping people locked up - increased prison numbers means more mustering crisises, which means more flying planeloads of prisoners about, more construction works to make prisons, etc. Probably something simple like the total cost of the department over the capacity in prisoner population would do the trick there.

It's a nice idea, but the overall result - more prisons - doesn't really fit the "Small Government" goal.

My take on this is that we're victimising the wrong crimes, and thereby creating a culture of crime from people who are simply exercising freedoms, ie peaceful disobedience.

In particular, the laws on recreational drugs create a huge black market for them and fund groups for whom their "disobedience" would not be considered "peaceful".

The impact of wiping prohibitionism once and for all could be examined as a possible counter-balance to making prison terms longer. That certainly would make for interesting reading.

6:36 PM
Lindsay Mitchell said...

Sam, when I talk about reducing victims I don't mean victims of self- inflicted "crime". I don't care for the idea of more prisons but if it's a choice between that and more victims of violent crime and property theft it's my preference.

6:53 PM
Oswald Bastable said...

It's the cost of keeping them behind bars compared to the cost of having crims at large that needs to be considered..

Plenty of information on that subject here:

http://www.safe-nz.org.nz/

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