The country's ballooning prison population can be reduced by revising bail, parole and sentencing law, a criminal justice group says.
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Just Speak's new report The Case Against Prisons was released yesterday and aims to debunk popular justifications for locking people up.
Director Tania Sawicki Mead said the report's purpose was to start a conversation about why we send people to jail.
A common justification was that prison helped rehabilitate offenders but in reality most people came out of prison worse-off, she said.
"There is a very small minority of people who do present a danger, but the vast majority of people are not being served well by being in prison.
"In fact, whatever circumstances that drove them to being in prison aren't being addressed - they're being exacerbated."
Another false justification was that prison acted as a deterrent, Ms Sawicki Mead said.
"What a large body of international evidence shows is that most people do not think about the deterrents when they think about committing a crime.
"If we want to stop people from offending we need to find out what's driving them to offend - and it's not a rational decision of the pros and cons."
She said investment in prevention was the only way forward.
"At the moment it's a very ineffective ambulance at the bottom of the cliff."
She said prevention was the long-term, sustainable goal, but change could happen in the short-term by reassessing New Zealand criminal law. The Bail Amendment Act 2013 was predicted to lead to an increase of 50 beds but exceeded that by about six times.
"Our remand population is 30 percent of our prison population and these are people who may not ever be convicted of a crime.
"Bail, parole and sentencing are all things that have to be on the criminal justice agenda if we're going to make any difference to this truly abhorrent statistic."
The prison population has now ballooned to more than 10,000.
Any plan into addressing the prison system needed to address Māori incarceration, Ms Sawicki Mead said
"We need to look at why we are locking up so many Māori."
The present system "fundamentally contributes" to why people entered the community worse off, she said.