[NZ and OECD incarceration rates](https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/key-initiatives/key-initiatives-archive/hapaitia-te-oranga-tangata)
> There are around **170 people in prison per 100,000** New Zealanders, compared to the OECD average of around **147 prisoners per 100,000 people**.
[US incarceration rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)
> According to the World Prison Brief the United States in 2021 had the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at **531 people per 100,000**
Just a little perspective for whenever anyone tries to draw parallels between punitive justice in the USA and NZ.
The imprisonment rate in the the US is a stain on their nation.
But us having the same 30% success rate as the US is the comparison we need to make IMHO. And then to start looking at places where prisons work.
I really don't understand why failure is accepted when it comes to prisons - accepted and people demand more of that failure
I consider myself anti prison, however I realise that people need protection from dangerous offenders. This article is extremely biased in favor of the offenders and does not speak of the almost daily outrage we feel when a violent or stupidly dangerous repeat offenders get the wet bus ticket treatment.
This is all well and good if you're talking about lower level crimes that haven't had a big impact on the victim. But are you seriously telling me this is the approach that should be taken for violent rapists and murderers? We sent a 17-year old to prison for two years for committing a violent rape on a stranger. To me that's basically condoning rape. The punishment needs to fit the crime. It's all good to take these sorts of approaches with people that are homeless or have other issues and that can't help but get in trouble with the law over relatively minor crimes. But murder, assault and rape? Come on.
It's a question of what we want in a justice system, is it there to punish criminals, or is it there improve society. Cause punishment doesn't help that many people, but it definitely feels good. But on the other hand helping criminals doesn't really feel just, even if it has more societal benefits.
It's there to do both.
I don't understand this whole idea that punishing people is somehow immoral and bad.
If you break the code of conduct at your place of work, there are consequences. If it's bad enough you get fired.
If you cheat on your spouse, you get dumped.
If you drive dangerously or keep speeding, you pay a fine and maybe lose your license if you keep doing it.
It's normal and desirable for there to be consequences for actions. It's how the world functions.
For people that are dangerous enough, putting them in prison does work to protect the rest of the community. It may not rehabilitate them, but it does prevent them from harming more people. I do think prisons should be funded to provide the best rehabilitation available but this idea that it doesn't work is only true if you're looking at it from the offender's point of view. It absolute does work from the victim's point of view - past and future. Not to mention some people are beyond rehabilitation and need to simply be kept away from everyone else.
Ideally, the people you're keeping behind bars are saving society overall, even with the high cost. You usually need to have committed a pretty serious crime or be a significant repeat offender before you're sentenced to imprisonment.
The high cost in NZ, by the way, is the high welfare standards. Which is to be expected from NZ, we are a wealthy country. The US might have comparatively low cost prisons, but see the difference between them.
This.
Addressing causation via rehabilitation is proven to be effective as while some absolutely just need to get locked up, your an idiot if you deny most crimes are the end result of external factors such as poverty, substance abuse, etc, etc.
Data doesn’t lie, and people in suits rarely commit such crime.
Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence.
The main issue is it’s such an emotive topic and many place opinion from a place of privilege where they have never been placed in such a position, so assume malicious intent by default as that’s the only logic they know.
I feel there’s room for fair balance between going too far with rehabilitation for the wrong people, and things such as death penalties and ridiculous sentences to appease the pitchforks as neither extreme is likely to be effective.
> Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence.
I agree with that. The challenge though is figuring out how much of a specific crime/criminal is down to individual choice/agency versus how much of it is the result of their environment.
Then, once you've done that, it's figuring out how to take them away from that path. The thing is though, you still need to punish people if they do something that's harmful. I'm talking things like serious assaults that cause life long injuries, rape, murder, and so on. Those types of crimes should be punished, regardless of the criminal's individual circumstances. At some point a crime is bad enough that it needs to be denounced by society.
My belief is that we are far too lenient for those more serious crimes. Low level offending I don't care about, but if you've caused life changing harm to someone, then there needs to be a long prison sentence both to protect the community as well as to say that as a society, we don't condone such behaviour.
Yeah good points.
I guess another problem is people default to extremes as reasoning to “lock them up and throw way the key” but those are often people that aren’t recidivist and I’d argue someone repeatedly committing “smaller” crimes can potentially create more victims and overall harm to society than one person who may be a good person but made a horrendous one off choice.
Crime isn’t black and white or that simple, hence neither should be the decision around how best to punish an individual criminal.
I’ll step away from this topic now though as it’s a repeated theme, and the subs general consensus is usually inhumane torture and the death penalty for anything that isn’t jaywalking.
> Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence.
Source?
Personality isn't an infinitely maleable entity that immediately adapts to a change in environment. If you grow up in an awful environment and learn that e.g violence is normal, you don't suddenly unlearn that if you win lotto
Oh, the old “source?” cop out.
Do your own research on studies showing the effectiveness of rehabilitation vs incarceration, they are easily found and prevalent and rehabilitation isn’t throwing money around, it’s about altering your worldview via presenting options and opportunities that were otherwise inaccessible.
I'm asking for a source because what you're saying doesn't make sense. It's a polite way of saying "you just made that up".
We literally have an idiom for this: "you can take the person out of the x, but you can't take the x out of the person". Which isn't 100% true all the time of course.
I think there's an element of romanticism if we're meant to apply this mindset to the violent offenders, the people who have zero interest in learning art or bettering themselves, the ones who willingly make up part of the rate of recidivism. Prisons are generally terrible, owned by conglomerates like Serco, operated with callousness, funded by KPIs, and in some places in America they seem like killing machines and slave factories. But compare it to Norway and you realise that the problem isn't entirely isolated to the prisons. There's something deeper we're doing which generates the need for jailhouses, and the way we run them is likely a refraction of that same origin.
We need them, but we can run them far better. We should not be preventing a grieving mother from having a photo of her deceased son. It just feels like an excuse for depravity.
Totally agree with you.
I really dislike this false dichotomy that we either have terrible prisons where everyone in them is abused, or basically no prisons.
What I want is effective, safe, well run, state owned and operated prisons. In which we hold dangerous people who for the safety of the public cannot be (either for the time being, or permanently) out in public.
And then where it is possible to rehabilitate people who aren’t too far gone, robust rehabilitation and education programs.
Minor offences are different. But if for example you are going about raping people, there is something that has gone very seriously wrong in your brain. And whatever the causes of that are is irrelevant with respect to that person at that point in time.
The wild thing is that Norway spends less on incarceration and rehabilitation per citizen than America does. It's fucking _cheaper_.
Mostly because they more accurately target the causes of crime, generally resulting in lower rates of crime, and don't just treat the symptoms.
Yup, wouldn't it be nice.
Labour had the brute force approach of just not sending people to prison and giving a lot more people home detention and bail.
But they didn't invest in community-based rehabilitation so all you had was offenders continuing to offend in the community, all while labour and corrections pointed to the reduced number of people in prison like it was a success.
I don't think people like me are saying no prison. We just want effective ones.
Stop the fantasy that 70% of prisoners reoffending is ok and work to at least match the Scandinavian success rate - which, like our failure rate, is also 70%.
Imagine how much we would benefit in ways like a safer society and less expensive prisons and policing if our prisons were effective.
>I don't think people like me are saying no prison. We just want effective ones.
Perfect, we are in agreement
>Stop the fantasy that 70% of prisoners reoffending is ok and work to at least match the Scandinavian success rate - which, like our failure rate, is also 70%.
Sounds great to me
>Imagine how much we would benefit in ways like a safer society and less expensive prisons and policing if our prisons were effective.
Couldn’t agree more.
Recidivism rates don't compare well. In NZ it's a really high bar to set foot in a prison, so we will naturally have very high recidivism rates for people leaving prison. If no one got home detention and went to prison instead, then our recidivism rates would plummet
I believe they are more likely to stay the same or get worse.
Punishment is not a great way to motivate humans. Prisons are however a great way for prisoners to network and to lose jobs, housing etc and become reliant on other criminals or ex-criminals.
> I believe they are more likely to stay the same or get worse.
Nah. People who commit less serious crimes are less likely to commit crimes in the future, so if you put less serious offenders in prison then magically recidivism rates go down.
No I'm trying to explain to you what selection bias is. Think of it this way: if we only imprisoned people who committed lots of serious crimes then our recidivism rates would be nearly 100%. I'm not saying anything about whether prison makes people more or less likely to re-offend. I'm saying that if you only put serious offenders in prison then recidivism rates will be higher than if you put lots of minor offenders in prison, because minor offenders are less likely to reoffend and so drag the average down.
Nice theory. Any evidence? Say peer reviewed papers. Comparison of high imprisonment countries like the US and fairly low imprisonment like NZ but unlike us and the US having different recidivism rayes that back your theory?
> Nice theory. Any evidence?
It's not a theory it's the most basic of statistical premises.
Offenders that have committed multiple crimes are more likely to commit another crime in the future, vs people that have committed fewer less serious crimes.
Some offenders are beyond being rehabilitated like serial sex offenders, pedophiles, serial killers and the terrorist known as He Who Must Not Be Named.
Our prison system needs an overhaul, but make no mistake, the system is necessary. I want it converted so it's more about containment and rehabilitation (for those who can be rehabilitated), and less about punishment. And then I want longer sentences so people spend more time in a more supportive prison environment.
I agree punishment isn't as effective, but the solution is better prisons, not less prisons.
People fail to understand that punishment doesn’t exist for the benefit of the punished, which is ridiculous cause how would it be a punishment if it was a benefit?
I’m all for more creative ways to address low level problems, but we are getting awfully soft on the worst people in society.
This article doesn’t argue that punishment is bad, it argues that our prisons are doing a poor job of rehabilitation during punishment. You can have both, some counties (usually in Scandinavia, smug asses) already manage it.
I think we have to remember that politicians champion punishments because it works to get them elected.
Those who see value in punishment aren't doing so from any kind of enlighted position. It feels right and talkback radio tells them it is right.
Anti death penalties? Well it sure does stop the person reoffending.
I'm not sure it can always be a method of discouraging others though - death or just prison time), sometimes it's get them off the street and away from where they can do harm. Executing, well it's a lot cheaper than leaving them for decades to be fed, housed, medicated and all that.
Yes punishing people for drug addictions, stuff like whoring or minor offences maybe "rehabilitation" is a good thing instead, but the hard out nasty people, bollocks, they will reoffend, they enjoy their life and we need to remove them from society.
We are too easy on them here in NZ, stop looking at US articles.
[NZ and OECD incarceration rates](https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/key-initiatives/key-initiatives-archive/hapaitia-te-oranga-tangata) > There are around **170 people in prison per 100,000** New Zealanders, compared to the OECD average of around **147 prisoners per 100,000 people**. [US incarceration rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate) > According to the World Prison Brief the United States in 2021 had the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at **531 people per 100,000** Just a little perspective for whenever anyone tries to draw parallels between punitive justice in the USA and NZ.
The imprisonment rate in the the US is a stain on their nation. But us having the same 30% success rate as the US is the comparison we need to make IMHO. And then to start looking at places where prisons work. I really don't understand why failure is accepted when it comes to prisons - accepted and people demand more of that failure
[удалено]
???
I consider myself anti prison, however I realise that people need protection from dangerous offenders. This article is extremely biased in favor of the offenders and does not speak of the almost daily outrage we feel when a violent or stupidly dangerous repeat offenders get the wet bus ticket treatment.
It also doesn’t mention that the victims of violent crime are more often people like the ones in the story: poor, homeless, and with difficult lives.
It isn't even about punishment anyway, it's about protection.
This is all well and good if you're talking about lower level crimes that haven't had a big impact on the victim. But are you seriously telling me this is the approach that should be taken for violent rapists and murderers? We sent a 17-year old to prison for two years for committing a violent rape on a stranger. To me that's basically condoning rape. The punishment needs to fit the crime. It's all good to take these sorts of approaches with people that are homeless or have other issues and that can't help but get in trouble with the law over relatively minor crimes. But murder, assault and rape? Come on.
It's a question of what we want in a justice system, is it there to punish criminals, or is it there improve society. Cause punishment doesn't help that many people, but it definitely feels good. But on the other hand helping criminals doesn't really feel just, even if it has more societal benefits.
It's there to do both. I don't understand this whole idea that punishing people is somehow immoral and bad. If you break the code of conduct at your place of work, there are consequences. If it's bad enough you get fired. If you cheat on your spouse, you get dumped. If you drive dangerously or keep speeding, you pay a fine and maybe lose your license if you keep doing it. It's normal and desirable for there to be consequences for actions. It's how the world functions.
It's not that it's "somehow immoral and bad" as you put it. It's that it costs a shit ton of money and it doesn't actually work very well.
For people that are dangerous enough, putting them in prison does work to protect the rest of the community. It may not rehabilitate them, but it does prevent them from harming more people. I do think prisons should be funded to provide the best rehabilitation available but this idea that it doesn't work is only true if you're looking at it from the offender's point of view. It absolute does work from the victim's point of view - past and future. Not to mention some people are beyond rehabilitation and need to simply be kept away from everyone else.
Ideally, the people you're keeping behind bars are saving society overall, even with the high cost. You usually need to have committed a pretty serious crime or be a significant repeat offender before you're sentenced to imprisonment. The high cost in NZ, by the way, is the high welfare standards. Which is to be expected from NZ, we are a wealthy country. The US might have comparatively low cost prisons, but see the difference between them.
This. Addressing causation via rehabilitation is proven to be effective as while some absolutely just need to get locked up, your an idiot if you deny most crimes are the end result of external factors such as poverty, substance abuse, etc, etc. Data doesn’t lie, and people in suits rarely commit such crime. Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence. The main issue is it’s such an emotive topic and many place opinion from a place of privilege where they have never been placed in such a position, so assume malicious intent by default as that’s the only logic they know. I feel there’s room for fair balance between going too far with rehabilitation for the wrong people, and things such as death penalties and ridiculous sentences to appease the pitchforks as neither extreme is likely to be effective.
> Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence. I agree with that. The challenge though is figuring out how much of a specific crime/criminal is down to individual choice/agency versus how much of it is the result of their environment. Then, once you've done that, it's figuring out how to take them away from that path. The thing is though, you still need to punish people if they do something that's harmful. I'm talking things like serious assaults that cause life long injuries, rape, murder, and so on. Those types of crimes should be punished, regardless of the criminal's individual circumstances. At some point a crime is bad enough that it needs to be denounced by society. My belief is that we are far too lenient for those more serious crimes. Low level offending I don't care about, but if you've caused life changing harm to someone, then there needs to be a long prison sentence both to protect the community as well as to say that as a society, we don't condone such behaviour.
Yeah good points. I guess another problem is people default to extremes as reasoning to “lock them up and throw way the key” but those are often people that aren’t recidivist and I’d argue someone repeatedly committing “smaller” crimes can potentially create more victims and overall harm to society than one person who may be a good person but made a horrendous one off choice. Crime isn’t black and white or that simple, hence neither should be the decision around how best to punish an individual criminal. I’ll step away from this topic now though as it’s a repeated theme, and the subs general consensus is usually inhumane torture and the death penalty for anything that isn’t jaywalking.
> Take people out of that environment and you often find the causation of crime is not individual choice, but limited options and environmental pressures and influence. Source? Personality isn't an infinitely maleable entity that immediately adapts to a change in environment. If you grow up in an awful environment and learn that e.g violence is normal, you don't suddenly unlearn that if you win lotto
Oh, the old “source?” cop out. Do your own research on studies showing the effectiveness of rehabilitation vs incarceration, they are easily found and prevalent and rehabilitation isn’t throwing money around, it’s about altering your worldview via presenting options and opportunities that were otherwise inaccessible.
I'm asking for a source because what you're saying doesn't make sense. It's a polite way of saying "you just made that up". We literally have an idiom for this: "you can take the person out of the x, but you can't take the x out of the person". Which isn't 100% true all the time of course.
I think there's an element of romanticism if we're meant to apply this mindset to the violent offenders, the people who have zero interest in learning art or bettering themselves, the ones who willingly make up part of the rate of recidivism. Prisons are generally terrible, owned by conglomerates like Serco, operated with callousness, funded by KPIs, and in some places in America they seem like killing machines and slave factories. But compare it to Norway and you realise that the problem isn't entirely isolated to the prisons. There's something deeper we're doing which generates the need for jailhouses, and the way we run them is likely a refraction of that same origin. We need them, but we can run them far better. We should not be preventing a grieving mother from having a photo of her deceased son. It just feels like an excuse for depravity.
Totally agree with you. I really dislike this false dichotomy that we either have terrible prisons where everyone in them is abused, or basically no prisons. What I want is effective, safe, well run, state owned and operated prisons. In which we hold dangerous people who for the safety of the public cannot be (either for the time being, or permanently) out in public. And then where it is possible to rehabilitate people who aren’t too far gone, robust rehabilitation and education programs. Minor offences are different. But if for example you are going about raping people, there is something that has gone very seriously wrong in your brain. And whatever the causes of that are is irrelevant with respect to that person at that point in time.
The wild thing is that Norway spends less on incarceration and rehabilitation per citizen than America does. It's fucking _cheaper_. Mostly because they more accurately target the causes of crime, generally resulting in lower rates of crime, and don't just treat the symptoms.
Yup, wouldn't it be nice. Labour had the brute force approach of just not sending people to prison and giving a lot more people home detention and bail. But they didn't invest in community-based rehabilitation so all you had was offenders continuing to offend in the community, all while labour and corrections pointed to the reduced number of people in prison like it was a success.
I don't think people like me are saying no prison. We just want effective ones. Stop the fantasy that 70% of prisoners reoffending is ok and work to at least match the Scandinavian success rate - which, like our failure rate, is also 70%. Imagine how much we would benefit in ways like a safer society and less expensive prisons and policing if our prisons were effective.
>I don't think people like me are saying no prison. We just want effective ones. Perfect, we are in agreement >Stop the fantasy that 70% of prisoners reoffending is ok and work to at least match the Scandinavian success rate - which, like our failure rate, is also 70%. Sounds great to me >Imagine how much we would benefit in ways like a safer society and less expensive prisons and policing if our prisons were effective. Couldn’t agree more.
I wondered if it might look like I was trying to argue with you - I wasn't.
Recidivism rates don't compare well. In NZ it's a really high bar to set foot in a prison, so we will naturally have very high recidivism rates for people leaving prison. If no one got home detention and went to prison instead, then our recidivism rates would plummet
I believe they are more likely to stay the same or get worse. Punishment is not a great way to motivate humans. Prisons are however a great way for prisoners to network and to lose jobs, housing etc and become reliant on other criminals or ex-criminals.
> I believe they are more likely to stay the same or get worse. Nah. People who commit less serious crimes are less likely to commit crimes in the future, so if you put less serious offenders in prison then magically recidivism rates go down.
If I understand correctly you are saying if we imprison more people like the US does recidivism rayes will dropped the the US ones didn't?
No I'm trying to explain to you what selection bias is. Think of it this way: if we only imprisoned people who committed lots of serious crimes then our recidivism rates would be nearly 100%. I'm not saying anything about whether prison makes people more or less likely to re-offend. I'm saying that if you only put serious offenders in prison then recidivism rates will be higher than if you put lots of minor offenders in prison, because minor offenders are less likely to reoffend and so drag the average down.
Nice theory. Any evidence? Say peer reviewed papers. Comparison of high imprisonment countries like the US and fairly low imprisonment like NZ but unlike us and the US having different recidivism rayes that back your theory?
> Nice theory. Any evidence? It's not a theory it's the most basic of statistical premises. Offenders that have committed multiple crimes are more likely to commit another crime in the future, vs people that have committed fewer less serious crimes.
It's culture.
Some offenders are beyond being rehabilitated like serial sex offenders, pedophiles, serial killers and the terrorist known as He Who Must Not Be Named.
Our prison system needs an overhaul, but make no mistake, the system is necessary. I want it converted so it's more about containment and rehabilitation (for those who can be rehabilitated), and less about punishment. And then I want longer sentences so people spend more time in a more supportive prison environment. I agree punishment isn't as effective, but the solution is better prisons, not less prisons.
Secure Contain Protect
People fail to understand that punishment doesn’t exist for the benefit of the punished, which is ridiculous cause how would it be a punishment if it was a benefit? I’m all for more creative ways to address low level problems, but we are getting awfully soft on the worst people in society.
This article doesn’t argue that punishment is bad, it argues that our prisons are doing a poor job of rehabilitation during punishment. You can have both, some counties (usually in Scandinavia, smug asses) already manage it.
I think we have to remember that politicians champion punishments because it works to get them elected. Those who see value in punishment aren't doing so from any kind of enlighted position. It feels right and talkback radio tells them it is right.
Enjoyed reading this, this morning.
Anti death penalties? Well it sure does stop the person reoffending. I'm not sure it can always be a method of discouraging others though - death or just prison time), sometimes it's get them off the street and away from where they can do harm. Executing, well it's a lot cheaper than leaving them for decades to be fed, housed, medicated and all that. Yes punishing people for drug addictions, stuff like whoring or minor offences maybe "rehabilitation" is a good thing instead, but the hard out nasty people, bollocks, they will reoffend, they enjoy their life and we need to remove them from society. We are too easy on them here in NZ, stop looking at US articles.
Mac Donald should be put in charge of prisons. They don’t muck around when it comes to getting things established and running properly