Locke Keith: Organised Crime (Penalties and Sentencing) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Locke Keith: Organised Crime (Penalties and Sentencing) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 01 July 2008. Volume:648;Page:17090. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 There was a good article in the  
New Zealand Herald  
a few days ago on 25 June. The article was written by a chap called Brian Rudman and had the headline “Lock ‘em up? Must be election year”. This bill is about a law and order harsh and punitive approach to the problems with criminality in our society. It is a law and order competition between the Labour Party and the National Party. Labour has just pulled this cat out of the bag in trying to outbid National and as a political tactic it is idiotic. It is legitimising National’s right-wing “bash ‘em lock ‘em up” policies. National is always able to go one better than Labour. Richard Worth has already said earlier on today: “Labour has stolen our policy”. It is the same thing that has happened with tax cuts. Labour in adopting National’s tax cut strategy has in essence legitimised National Party policy and only given the National Party a greater poll lead. It has legitimised in the form of tax cuts the idea of looking after oneself rather than being concerned about social provision—that is looking after the environment and all the other things that the Government needs to spend tax money on. 
It is an idiotic tactic; it is putting Labour even lower and lower in the polls. That is demonstrably provable and a really progressive Government would not compete with National as to how many people to put in jail. The number of people in jail has gone up hugely in Labour’s term in Government. It is now around 8000; at 197 per 100000 it is one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world. It is twice as much as most Western European countries and of course in National’s bidding Simon Power has promised another new prison to up that total even more. One does not need to be too smart to know that prisons are a training ground for crime. The more people we put in jail the more people we are training to commit more crimes and the more members of criminal groups as defined in this law whom we put in prison the more that jails are a training ground. 
Russell Fairbrother says that we are putting the leaders of gangs in jail and there is no denying a certain advantage in putting the leaders of criminal groups in jail but often it just means that more leaders come through the ranks and the leaders who end up in jail continue their work training the people inside. The young kids in the gangs who sometimes get caught up under this law as being associated with criminal activity get more training too. It is very hard for young kids in jail to get out of a gang because they do not have far to run if they get offside with a gang. It is not the best environment to get out of a gang and the rehabilitation programmes in jails are not particularly good. 
I was looking at my emails a few minutes ago and one came through from Prison Fellowship and it is appealing for money. It says: “Competing pressure and priorities facing the Government have meant that the recent Budget provided significantly less than we had hoped for. We need $200000 to meet our payments over the next 2 months.” This is a group that provides mentors and helps prisoners coming out of jail to get homes and jobs. They stand alongside them in the transition to a life inside the law rather than outside the law. This organisation wants $200000 which is just about the cost per year of keeping a couple of people in prison. It costs $92000 per prisoner per year to keep a prisoner in jail or a total budget for our Department of Corrections of about $800 million. It would be much better to spend that money on addressing the causes of crime in various ways and providing people in areas that are subject to a lot of criminality with more creative things to do. 
I was just reading over the weekend in one of the papers about the rather unusual policy in Venezuela. They went into an area with a high youth criminal rate and distributed classical musical instruments. The kids started playing them in a community setting and the crime rate dropped. I think creating strong communities is important. I think it is important to empower the community groups in poorer areas that just do not have the resources to run their various sporting and cultural activities properly so that they can pull in the young kids. We should be giving them more resources. 
The  
New Zealand Herald  
article quotes Professor Coyle who was a prison governor in the United Kingdom for some time. He said that policy makers are now—unfortunately not in New Zealand in the Labour and National Parties—examining whether the cash for prisons would be better spent on “rebuilding the social fabric of community—schools healthcare public spaces etc.” That is the answer—to work where possible with gang members for constructive ends. Russell Fairbrother said that he does have some friends in gangs presumably at the less criminal end and hopefully his friendship is working towards constructive ends. The persecution of gangs is not necessarily productive; it can strengthen them because gangs tighten up when they are being attacked—that is what gang warfare is all about. If a leader is losing a bit of loyalty in his or her gang—it is usually his of course—that leader starts a scrap with another gang. 
The problem with this particular law—and it has been addressed and debated as it has been amended over the years—is that it is partly a law of guilt by association which is not the fairest way of approaching criminality. It has not worked very well as the last speaker indicated. At present clause 98 says that a person can be convicted if he or she is “reckless as to whether his or her participation may contribute to the occurrence of a criminal activity.” That is so vague that the conviction rate in a reasonable justice system ends up being quite low. It is a much looser definition than is required by the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. Article 5 states that to qualify a person “takes an active part in [the] criminal group activities of the organized criminal group;”. The conviction rate under our loose definition is not much more than 10 percent. What has tended to happen is that the people who have been convicted have been convicted on another charge like violent robbery and then membership of a criminal group has been chucked in on top of that rather than being proved as the base crime. 
Now under this bill it will be a little different; it is going to be an aggravating factor in sentencing. All one needs to do is prove that the person has an association with a group. There is the argument that we need 10 years so that we can get interception warrants. But surely if the underlying crime that is being investigated and this criminal group is associated with it has a penalty of 10 years in most cases an interception warrant can be issued. Why do we need to up the ante for this particular offence to achieve that purpose? This bill is going in the wrong direction; it is only increasing our prison numbers and increasing the use of prisons as a training ground for further crime. There are examples all around the world and particularly in Scandinavia of going in the opposite direction; a better direction. 
Our goals should be to reduce the prison population not to boast how many people we have in jail. We are still a bit behind America which is the other very bad example but there are good examples in Scandinavia where they have decided to get the prison population down. They have put in rehabilitation programmes reduced sentences and looked for other ways of dealing with crime outside of imposing long sentences and the prison population and the crime rates have gone down. It can succeed if we put our money into groups like Prison Fellowship which I just talked about and into reducing poverty. When we have beneficiary families who are worse off than they were in 1991 at the time of the benefit cuts under the Bolger Government then that is a breeding ground for crime. We have to address all of those issues if we are to solve the crime problems.