Harawira Hone: Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10686] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
:  
A tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Huri rauna kia ora tatou katoa e te Whare. When we want to look at prison statistics and prison programmes at programmes that work and programmes that do not we do not have to look any further than the good old USA where dingbat sheriffs think they are clever to march prisoners around in pink uniforms and idiots sign laws allowing police to arrest and jail anyone who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant—people like Parekura Horomia and Mita Ririnui sitting over there! The USA is also where Governor Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger oversees California’s penal system which is facing a crisis of overcrowding with more than 167000 inmates often triple-bunked angry fearful and exploding into violence across our screens every week on  
America’s Hardest Prisons 
. California’s penal system costs $8 billion which is 11 percent of the state budget—and blowing out of control as we speak. 
Arnie might be a muscle freak but he did not get to be the governor of one of the world’s top ten economies without having some smarts. It occurred to him that there had to be a better way to deal with prisoners than the philosophy of locking them up and throwing away the key which the “three strikes” morons of the overseas and domestic variety would use to deal with crime. So he proposed a simple solution. He divided criminals into two categories: those who pose little or no risk and those who need regular supervision. The idea was to take all the less threatening prisoners out of jail and put them into other programmes. It was a simple solution but it was a seismic shift in reform and it has been long sought by independent analysts and commissions into penal reform. That brings us back to Aotearoa where instead of trying to learn from the mistakes of the Californian penal system we seem hell-bent on following it down the deep dark hole that Arnie is struggling to get out of. 
The Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill is scary. It ignores even the advice of the Government’s own Attorney-General that the “three strikes and you’re out” law could be in breach of our fundamental human rights and in particular in breach of the section of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act that protects New Zealanders against cruel degrading or disproportionately severe punishment such as having to face a sentence of life imprisonment for perhaps a third charge involving the unlawful discharging of a firearm which is a common occurrence at Tuhoe and Ngapuhi tangihanga and Tuhoe Treaty settlements for that matter. Unlawfully discharging a firearm could mean using granddad’s rifle when one is out hunting having never even thought to get it registered. 
Experts like Dr John Pratt Professor of Criminology at Victoria University will tell us what I told the House last week about a similar “kick them while they’re down” bill which is that without a sound philosophical base penal measures are nothing more than the nasty vicious form of vengeance that we thought had died out in Europe before Pakeha even came here. Just 5 years ago a Cabinet paper entitled  
Effective Interventions 
 concluded that there are smarter ways than prison to prevent crime and make criminals accountable to their victims and to society and that prison is not the most effective or efficient approach to reducing crime. 
That same paper noted than even the practice of remanding people in custody was being influenced by growing public political and media pressure for change. In fact in the 10 years from 1997 to 2007 prison sentences went up by 37 percent but cases of remand in custody went up by 214 percent. All of that of course saw the Department of Corrections’ budget blow out to $900 million for 2007-08 and if we carry on the way we are going the budget blowout will be $2 billion by 2020. 
The silly thing is that this mania about building more and more prisons and filling them even before they are built and at a cost that this country cannot sustain is not only illogical but also unnecessary. International research out of Washington confirms that there are excellent alternatives to prison which reduce not only the demand for prison beds but also crime. The problem though is that although all our resources are being siphoned off into building prisons doubling up the bunks in cells putting prisoners in containers and locking inmates down for 16 hours to cope with overcrowding the positive programmes for prisoner rehabilitation like work training and education are being closed off. We cannot even provide for 500 drug rehab places a year in a system with 6500 prisoners who are currently drug or alcohol dependent. 
International evidence tells us that “three strikes” has led to a massive increase in prison populations and jailhouse homicides. It has had a major negative impact on non-violent offenders their families and their poor communities. It has resulted in a blowout in cost for society and the problem is getting worse. The evidence also shows that imprisonment does not deter crime and that harsher prison conditions and longer sentences do not reduce reoffending. The evidence shows that reductions in crime usually come about through better drug and alcohol programmes greater employment and education opportunities stronger families and stronger communities. 
For the last few years we have seen a “build ’em and we will fill ’em” philosophy in terms of our prisons to the point where prisons targeted to be completed in 2011 are already filled in 2010 before building has been finished. That philosophy will be exacerbated by the “three strikes and you’re out” rule because it means we will be locking them up in rugby clubs and moving them around the country in buses at night time because there are no other beds for them to sleep in. We will be filling up the day rooms at police stations. We will run out of places to put people in jail. We will simply not be able to sustain that because at the end of the day we either lock them up for life—and we pay for it for life; we pay for it through the nose for life—or they will get out. And when they get out they will be seriously upset people and they will take that out on a whole lot of other people. 
There is no rehabilitation in this proposal. There is no intent to use the opportunity to change the nature of some of these people. I hear people asking how many chances they need. They do not even need one chance—it is about giving them the right chance the first time. The threat of heavier and heavier punishment does not change people. All it does is piss them off. It makes them angrier so when they come out they will be worse than when they went in. We have to try to turn this round and the “bash ’em and bash ’em again” philosophy has been proven not to work overseas. We would be foolish to go down that track. 
If the evidence was different I would say to give it a try. But the evidence is not different. It suggests that the best opportunity to turn people’s lives round is to try to get to them before they get to prison to improve their lot to address the causes of crime rather than the effects of crime and to attack poverty in the home. Whanau Ora provides the opportunity for Maori on this side of the House and on the other side of the House to put our hands up and say we think we can do better and then to challenge ourselves to do better so that we do not need Draconian legislation like this. This bill will simply take our country backwards into a time of vengeance and nasty mean-spirited viciousness; the kind of punishment meted out to people in 16th century England. Koina no mo tenei wa. Thank you very much. Kia ora tatou katoa.