Saturday, June 21, 2008

Welfare state spending and imprisonment rates

I was reading a paper which claims a negative correlation between welfare state spending and imprisonment rates ie the less spent on the welfare state as a % of gdp the higher the imprisonment rate. They plotted NZ as having 144 per 10,000 people in prison in 1998 with welfare spending at 21% of gdp.

In defiance of their theory both have increased in the past ten years.

Personally I don't think one can draw concrete conclusions about the relationship by comparing countries because there are just too many variables at play.

But while I was looking at imprisonment rates for NZ I came across this rather sobering fact. On any given day of the year 3.2 percent of male Maori 23 year-olds are in prison.

3 comments:

PM of NZ said...

Scary numbers, Lindsay.

Do you know if the 'prison sentenced' numbers as displayed include those 'in home detention' or is there maybe another similar but equally scary graph that shows the total sentenced?

Lindsay Mitchell said...

"The graph above gives a rate of imprisonment by the same gender-age-ethnicity sub-groupings in the previous graphs. Most notably, this reveals that 3.2% of all Maori males in the 23 year old age group were in prison on 30 June 2007, while the proportion of NZ European 23 year old males in prison was 0.4%."

This is the by-line, PM. So given there are another 30,000 individuals doing community work or with suspended sentences, over four times as many again, instead of 3 the number might rise to 12 or more. I would go with more.

Anonymous said...

On any given day of the year 3.2 percent of male Maori 23 year-olds are in prison.


Indeed it is "very sobering". Given the rapidly increasing rates of violent crime, this is clearly far, far too low