Judith Collins's legacy: image over reality.

A career summarised: no ideas, no direction, no success -- and not one car crushed

What does a career in politics achieve? 

This afternoon Judith Collins will give her valedictory speech in Parliament. Journalists call her career "colourful." They call her "Crusher." Let's review what she's done there over the years.

• she was one of 23 MPs who rented their home to themselves at taxpayers' expense
• she was always ready to give the trough a decent nudge -- costing us in 2023 more than $24,200, made up of more than $6000 for accommodation and just over $18,000 on travel (a massive saving for us from 2009 when her limos and international travel were costing us nearly $200,000)
• need we mention using her position to help the export business for which her husband was a director?
• brought down for the first time (of many) by her own Entitle-itis, one wag suggested 'Trougher' Collins would be a better nick than 'Crusher'
• as Police Minister she continued to ensure that gangs could make decent profits on illegal drugs, while also ensuring police focus more on revenue-gathering than resolving real crimes (cementing an image as tough but crushingly ignorant)
• as the #DirtyPolitics saga did reveal, she maintained a disinterest in ideas, and a consequent obsession with scandals and (ineffective) dirty tricks
• and as Police Minister (her only real job) what did she actually do beyond asset confiscation; suspension of your right to silence; and expanded search and surveillance powers for an extraordinary range of government departments? 
• apart from, of course, bringing in pathetic new laws to "crush" cars instead of simply applying laws already on the books -- the main goal of which "seems to be the generation of positive media coverage for Judith Collins"
• as opposition MP in 2007 she stood up on the steps of Parliament to swear total opposition to the anti-smacking amendment; and then one month later filed obediently into the lobbies to vote for it
• in any competition between real action or spin, it was almost always spin she favoured -- even if it made us less safe
• as Opposition MP in 2005 and desperate to be noticed, she did point out that the Labour Government's Working for Families package is an election bribe paid being paid for with voters' own money -- and then as government MP and minister continued to administer the bribe
• keeping alive the tradition of promising and reneging, Collins was happy to be photographed firing a pistol to court the gun lobby (posting one on her own Facebook page in case you missed it); before  being the only National MP to support banning semi-automatic weapons for civilian purposes, and to boast about it
• as Corrections Minister she drove the reintroduction of private prisons -- for the actual privatisation of force, an unconscionable mixing of the dollar and the gun, with all the temptation to corruption and abuse that goes with it
• as Opposition Leader, Collins did promise the National Party would reverse any attempts by the Ardern government to criminalise speech beyond the threshold of "inciting violence," and warned against ending up with "UK-style hate speech legislation that has ended up with people being criminalised and even imprisoned for foolish and silly comments." All good, except that as (In)Justice Minister she had already drawn up much the same thing under her Harmful Digital Communications Act which hit us in 2015
• as Police Minister in 2016 she did correctly observe that the primary welfare problem to solve is not a poverty of money, the premise behind Labour's Working for Families programme, but "a poverty of ideas, a poverty of parental responsibility, a poverty of love, a poverty of caring. ... it is not just a lack of money, it is primarily a lack of responsibility." And then sat back as her Government and Party kept the policy, and did nothing to arrest the real poverty she'd identified
• And just to be clear: 'Crusher Collins never even crushed one car. Not one. (Only three cars in total were crushed under her legislation, all of which were after she was moved on from the job.) Which could be her real legacy: one of image over reality.

On the credit side, 

• she did, as opposition MP, do a mini-Rosa Parks in walking out when women were refused permission to powhiri except from the back of the room
• she did, as leader, once proclaim National to believe in property rights (despite it being National who introduced the property-rights-destroying RMA) and did accurately point out that the ACT Party did not, saying "there they are arguing for more planners doing more planning rather than actually letting people get on with building their houses"
• she did, as leader of that same National Party, lead it to its second-worst-ever election defeat in 2020, with a 19% swing against
• she was one of the two National MPs who signed up to the bi-partisan accord on housing that helped lower rents and begin the blessed fall in over-priced house prices -- and then disgracefully remained silent has her new boss kicked it into touch, delaying real housing reform now for nearly four years.

Judith Collins arrived in Parliament after a decade in law and (govt-appointed) directorships as a young, fresh-faced MP in 2002, eager to solve the country's problems and to advance her own career. Without any ideas to guide her however she did nothing to solve anything, helped expand the role of government, and spent a life in service to the trough.

So, more exposure than most, but in the end no different to any of the other highly-paid beneficiaries there, really.

And now she's off to another taxpaid trough at the Law Commission ...

Collins in 2002: all promise, no substance

NB: Ele Ludemann posts a contrary assessment ...

"Prisons serve another purpose. They protect the public from dangerous people."

"Appalling crime story after appalling crime story gets reported. 
    "But media rarely report on the big decline in New Zealand's prison population.

Source: Department of Corrections: Prison Facts and Statistics, Sept. 2022

    "When Labour became government Kelvin Davis stated a goal of reducing the prison population and set about doing so. This is one policy goal they've actually achieved. But at what cost? ...

    "[A politician once] described ... prisons as a fiscal and moral failure. They certainly don't rehabilitate every inmate. They don't even come close. Far more needs to be done within prisons in that regard.
    "But prisons serve another purpose. They protect the public from dangerous people. That aspect of their place in society seems to have been overlooked in recent years."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'NZ's rarely-reported plummeting prison population'

Want tax cuts? End the War on Drugs.

 

So, strangely, just as a $1.8 billion government “surplus” is announced* a billion-dollar need for more prison beds is discovered (or will it really be a $2.5 billion bill?) to bed down 1800 more prisoners in our already swollen prison population.

With a prison population of just under ten-thousand, New Zealand’s incarceration rate is not yet among the world’s highest – America’s 693 per 100,000 makes our 202 look positively like a land of the free – but it’s still a lot more than otherwise comparable countries like the UK (143), Australia (152) and Canada (115), and fewer than two-thirds are there for sexual or violent crimes.

But here’s the thing. The War on Drugs is not just a failure, not just a formula for easy profits for gangs, not just a violent crackdown on a victimless crime, it’s also one way the prison popuation is much greater than it would be otherwise.

End Prohibition and you don’t just take away profits from gangs and reduce the violence around drugs, you also get to reduce the prison population by around fifteen percent.

Which is frighteningly close to that figure of 1800 beds the government reckons it needs to lock up the victims of victimless crimes.

So end the War on Drugs and (if the surplus is genuine*) then you have a legitimate argument for tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts. Don’t, and you won’t.

.

* Or is it really even a real surplus when net Crown debt increased by $1.3 billion? You tell me.

.

Surprise: I agree with Martyn Bradbury

How often is it possible to agree with a Martyn Bradbury post?

For me, it’s never happened before. Then astonishingly, over the weekend, I went from zero to two in as many minutes.

First when he attacked the outrage of private prisons – “If you voted National or ACT at the last election, you voted for this [“fight club”] atrocity at Serco.” And so you did. You voted for the ultimate in cronyism: the actual privatisation of force, with all the temptation to corruption and abuse that goes with it. The moral argument against private prisons is that the concept puts the gun in the service of the dollar. The practical argument is that it puts profits at the whim of bureaucratic management. The necessary outcome of both is what we now see in your headlines.

My second agreement with Bradbury was his defence of someone we both loathe, “but no one, not even Rodney Hide deserves to be treated like this…” Rodney’s story of state harassment suggests the surveillance state is already taking its powers so much for granted it doesn’t bother them who they bully, and for what.

You won’t hear me say this often, and maybe never again, but you should probably read both of Martyn Bradbury’s weekend posts:

• Dear National Party voters of NZ – so how’s that private prison experiment working out for you? – DAILY BLOG
• And then they came for Rodney Hide? – DAILY BLOG

RELATED POSTS:

• The aristocracy of prison management – NOT PC, 2009
• No to private prisons – NOT PC, 2010

What happens when you try the Prisoners Dilemma on actual prisoners?

So much of modern mainstream microeconomics is built on mathematical reasoning based on the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma.

But, as if to demonstrate the distance from the real world of the reasoning of mainstream economics, no-one had ever tested the Prisoner’s Dilemma on real prisoners.

And when two Hamburg researchers did, what they found confounded the elegant mathematical reasoning relied on by economists.

Not only did the prisoners cooperate far more than the alleged economists’ models say they would, they cooperated far more than students, on whom, to date, the only testing of the models has been done.

Now, in the real world when theories are found wanting they are abandoned for something better. Not so however in mainstream economics. 

Irving Fisher, for example, wrote the policy of price stabilisation that helped trigger the Great Depression in which he lost his shirt. Yet Fisher is praised to the skies by today’s leading alleged economists, and his policy of “price stabilisation” has been adopted by virtually every central bank in the world, and is promoted in every mainstream textbook in every one of the world’s macroeconomics classrooms.

Further, the graduates of those modern mainstream macroeconomics classrooms famously failed to see the Global Financial Crisis before it happened, and even months before were talking bollocks bout the “permanent prosperity” their policies had produced—yet today’s textbooks still continue to spout the macroeconomic nonsense of self-induced blindness.

So now that the basis of so much modern mainstream microeconomics is revealed as patent bollocks, do you think any modern mainstream micro-economists will begin re-examining the mistaken foundations of their discipline?

What do you think?

And if they don’t, is there any reason any of them should ever be taken seriously—rather than being taken out and shot for frauds?

• Read: “They Finally Tested The 'Prisoner's Dilemma' On Actual Prisoners — And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect”

The fatal flaw of “Three Strikes”

Opponents of the Three Strikes Law are up in arms that

When National passed its “three strikes” legislation in 2010, they promised that it would not be like California’s, and target shoplifters, drug dealers, and other petty criminals. Instead, it would be used on “the worst of the worst.” Throughout the debates (which are linked to from here), they repeatedly referred to “the worst murderers”, the “worst serious violent offenders” and the “worst” sexual offenders. So who are actually they using it on? Dumbarse muggers … like Elijah Akeem Whaanga, 21, [on] his second strike; Judge Tony Adeane told the Hastings man his two “street muggings” that netted “trophies of minimal value” meant his outlook was now “bleak in the extreme.” “When you next steal a hat or a cellphone or a jacket or a skateboard you will be sent to the High Court and there you will be sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment without parole,” Judge Adeane said.

“If our legal system thinks that this dumbarse is among ‘the worst of the worst,’” says Idiot/Savant, “or that his crimes merit 14 years imprisonment without parole, then it is fundamentally disproportionate and unjust… [violating] the Bill of Rights Act’s affirmation of freedom from disproportionately severe treatment or punishment.”

In response to this tirade of opposition objecting to the dumbarse’s bleak future under the three-strikes regime, defenders of the law look forward to this predator being caged, saying

this is precisely the kind of person the three strikes law is supposed to protect us from. This young man has terrorised multiple victims on multiple occasions. He has already received jail-time and a first strike. He is clearly not going to stop…
The entire point of the three-strikes legislation is completely ignored by most commentators. The purpose of the legislation is not to bring justice, punish or even deter the criminal. The entire purpose is to protect the public from predatory wolves. After the third act of violence, we can be sure that Mr Whaanga will continue to be a dangerous predator, barring some sort of miracle.

Neither the opponents nor the defenders of Three Strikes seem however to have spotted what can only be described as a fatal flaw of the legislation, which I pointed out when it was introduced: that rather than protecting the public it offers the offender a clear inducement to savagery. Because if this violent dickhead now stands to get 14 years’ imprisonment without parole for stealing “a hat or a cellphone or a jacket or a skateboard,” then why wouldn’t he murder for them? Or rape? Or terrorise?

Why wouldn’t he, when the sentence for these crimes these days is virtually the same (for someone with his obviously low time-preference) as the one with which he’s been threatened?

The three strikes law has a fatal flaw. But it will I fear be some innocent victim who experiences the fatality.

Murder. It’s still not O.K.

This is what leapt out of my newspaper this morning:

NZ HERALD: Hemmings' murderer had killed before
The man who murdered Good Samaritan Austin Hemmings in central Auckland spent eight years in an Australian jail for stabbing and killing his estranged girlfriend [and was then deported to NZ].
    He was also jailed in New Zealand on three separate occasions for knife [attacks] dating back to 1987…

Just think about that for a minute or two. A man who’d killed before and had been jailed before for knife attacks, all of them with the same sort of large kitchen knife with which he killed Austin Hemmings, was left by the courts out on the streets in Auckland ready to kill again.

Hmmm.

This is not the first time, is it. A long list of New Zealanders have been attacked killed and maimed by thugs who had a history, who were out on bail, out on parole, or who had killed before but had not been given the sentence their crime deserved.  Susan Couch, Tai Hobson and the families of Kylie Jones, Karl Kuckenbecker and many many other good people who deserved better can tell you the story.

The first duty of any responsible govt is to protect the rights, lives and liberties of its citizens. That’s its duty. That’s its job. This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

The legitimate arms of government are there to protect innocent people from those, like Austin Hemmings’s killer, who think force is the means by which humans deal with one another. His killer had certainly given sufficient indication that’s how he felt—"when he gets enraged, he needs to vent his anger" the court heard yesterday—yet the last time he attacked someone with a knife, stabbing them in the stomach with a large kitchen knife and partially severing their thumbs (this was after he’d killed his girlfriend and been deported back here), he was jailed for just two years and four months.

Think about that for a moment, too.

Think about a courtroom in which a record of three savage knife attacks and a murder were read out, and the man responsible was put away for our safety only for two years and four months. Two years and four months … after which he was free to vent his anger again on anyone he felt like.

If the police, the law courts and the prisons are going to do their proper job—which is protecting the rights, liberties and lives of its citizens—if “justice” isn’t going to end up with the adjective “vigilant” in front of it—then they need to protect those who value their life, liberty, property and happiness from those who've shown beyond reasonable doubt that they're quite partial to taking them all away.  ("The rights of the accused are not a primary," points out philosopher Ayn Rand, "they are a consequence derived from a man’s inalienable, individual rights. A consequence cannot survive the destruction of its cause.") 

That's the only real reason to catch people and lock them up, isn't it—the only defensible reason.  Not to punish them, but to to protect us.

But it’s not happening, is it.

Mr Hemmings' brother Craig said last night that a man with Brown's convictions should not have been on the streets. "It would alarm any New Zealander and, I would think, any sensible person."

But after unrepentantly drawing gallons of blood and taking one life, this young man was out on the street to do it again.

Something’s wrong, isn’t it. The government is failing in the one thing they’re supposed to be doing—protecting our rights, lives and liberties.

But instead of walking the beat and policing laws already on the books, such as (off the top of my head) bans on carrying large kitchen knives, police instead spend too much their time collecting revenue from folk driving a few “k”s over an arbitrary speed limit, raiding hydroponic garden-supply shops, and harassing the 400,000 NZers who harmlessly smoke cannabis.

And instead of taking violent crime seriously, they give the highest prosecution rates to administrative (91 percent), dishonesty (86 percent), and drug offences (84 percent), crimes which neither pick our pockets nor break our bones; while violent crime—which does—has among the lowest prosecution rates, at just 16 percent. And sentencing for violent crimes has only recently begun to recognise that NZers don’t want violent criminals dumped out on the streets, they want them locked up safe inside. (Read the recent trends in the report Patterns in Police Apprehensions in New Zealand 2005/06 to 2008/09.)  And let’s not mention how many violent crimes are committed while the perpetrator is out on bail, or parole for an earlier attack.

Something’s wrong, it’s alarming, and any sensible person would know that.

* * * *

PS: I can’t help being reminded that the last time I discussed this I was savaged by Russell Brown for wanting “a policeman at every dinner table” for pointing out that so many convicted for violent crime are being kept on the taxpayers’ tab, and for assuming Austin Hemmings’s killer must have been before the courts before.

The man arrested by police was not on bail or parole and apparently has no history of drug abuse or mental illness [said Russell attacking my silliness]. But he is a sickness beneficiary, and for Cresswell -- deftly applying righteousness as the cement between correlation and causation -- that is proof enough that welfarism is to blame.
Maybe we will discover that the man has a criminal history, maybe not…

Maybe we will, Russell. Maybe we will.

No to private prisons

Given what you read here every day, you’d probably expect to see me overjoyed at the government’s  announcement of a private prison in Wiri.

Well, I’m not.

You could only think I’d be overjoyed if you haven’t read me closely. Delivering prisoners to private enterprise to incarcerate is an unconscionable mixing of the dollar and the gun that can only lead to disaster.

It’s telling that the only privatisation contemplated by this Labour-Lite government is the only privatisation that should not be done.

But rather than repeat what I’ve already said before on this topic, let me just direct you there instead:

• The aristocracy of prison management
  Private prisons?  I’m agin’ ‘em – and so too are other like-minded enthusiasts of privatisation Paul Walker and Liberty Scott.  You see, there’s something fundamentally wrong about privatising force . . .

Prison

The number of people locked up inside NZ’s prisons is at a record high: a record 8,509 New Zealanders are imprisoned for doing things they shouldn’t have (compared with around 5000 in 1996/97, and up from 8493 on September 7), and folk are starting to ask questions like: “Where are they all going to go?”

Fair question, but it’s leaping ahead a little.  Here’s a question it might be worth answering first: What’s the primary purpose of the prison system?  I ask that, because to answer it is to solve the overcrowding problem.

So what is the primary purpose of the prison system? Answer: It’s not rehabilitation; if that happens, and it rarely does, then so much the better – but it’s not the primary purpose. And it’s not punishment; sure, we don’t want to see anybody gain from their crimes against others, but “an eye for an eye” solves nothing, does it – except perhaps as a deterrent.

And how effective has the deterrent been? With record numbers incarcerated, you’d have to say that’s going pretty bloody poorly.  And a fixation on taking eyes does leave everyone blind to what prison is really about.

So what is the primary purpose of the prison system then? Well, it goes back to the very purpose of government:

    “Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defence. It is for this reason that the collective force – which is only the organised combination of the individual forces – may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose.” (Frédéric Bastiat)
    Or:
    “If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.
This is the task of government–of a proper government—it’s basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why mean do need a government.
    “A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—ie., under objectively defined laws.” [Ayn Rand]

So what does that mean about the primary purpose of the prison system?  It means that its primary purpose is to protect us from those who’ve enacted force or fraud against others.

If some folk demonstrate that they’re prepared to take away a victim’s rights, then ipso facto their own rights should be equally forfeit.  That’s fair, right?  And if they’re prepared to make that person a victim, then we’re entitled to ensure they don’t take other victims as well.

So the primary purpose is protection.  We lock them up for our self-defence.  But how does this solve the overcrowding problem?

The question really answers itself. If you draw a distinction between people who’ve been locked up simply for doing things they “shouldn’t have” and people who’ve done things to other people that they shouldn’t have, then you have a group (the former one) who deserves to be released.  That is, draw a distinction between those who’ve committed crimes with actual victims and those who haven’t – i.e., those who need to be locked up for our self-defence, and those who don’t – and release the poor folk who’ve committed no crime other than one arbitrarily so defined by the government.

Even the most conservative figures suggest that group includes around ten to twenty percent of the present prison population. Find them, release them, and you can can stop talking about overcrowding for another electoral cycle – and you can begin to take those victimless crimes off the books so that people guilty of nothing other than hurting themselves don’t start filling up those places again.

Do it.

Provocation is not a legitimate defence [update 3]

Lawyer Stephen Franks argues at his blog this morning that provocation should be a defence in law, though not to the extent that it’s just been abused in a Christchurch court by a clear-eyed killer and his loathsome legal team.

Self defence (or accidental death) isn’t enough to cover all situations, says Franks, who offers this example:

    If Henk Bouma had been able to free himself to attack Poumako and his henchmen while they were leaving his Reporoa farmhouse no legal system with any respect for normal human emotions should convict him of a wrong. They tied Bouma up, took his wife Beverly to suffer for hours in another room, taunted Henk, then shot her dead.
    Self defence would not be available to someone in Henk’s position if he attacked the home invaders as they were leaving, because they were clearly then ending their threat. If only the facts had played out as proposed in this thought experiment. He would have deserved commendation, not conviction.

I don’t agree.  Don’t agree at all.  Much though it pains me to say it, Henk Bouma would have deserved conviction if he’d lost self control and done to those animals what we’d all like to do in his place. The provocation certainly should have been grounds for a light sentence, but his guilt would be beyond doubt. 

Our right to life gives us our right to self defence – what it doesn’t do however is give us a right to retaliate in cold blood, or even highly-charged blood. The very point of law is to place the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control – to take retaliation away from the lynch mob and place it in the hands of civilising force.

The use of retaliatory force [summarises the Clemson Institute] cannot be left to the discretion of individual men who may disagree about its use in particular circumstances. By delegating this power to their agency, the government, the citizens can ensure that objective rules in the form of objective laws [exist] to guide its use.

We can surely sympathise with a Mr Bouma who had attacked and killed his wife’s torturers. Given the shambles of the present legal system – a place where objective rules in the form of objective laws are celebrated only in their absence – a place where courts put victims on trial and convict people for crimes without any victims at all – where murderers kill while out on bail, convicted criminals remain unincarcerated even after dozens of guilty verdicts, and jailed criminals can enjoy all the comforts of home – a non-objective “system” where there’s every expectation that Mrs Bouma’s murderers could easily go unpunished – in this sort of place we should sympathise if Mr Bouma had given vent to what we all would have felt in his shoes. 

But that doesn’t make it right.  Life is not a Charles Bronson movie.

Let’s use the anger instead to keep insisting that the justice system be just in more than name only, not further contaminated by the existence of bogus defences to compensate for what is becoming a bogus justice system.

* * Other posts on this trial:

• “He was asking for it”
• Sticks & stones will break my bones, but names might get me manslaughter

 

UPDATE 1: The jury has declared Sophie Elliot’s killer guilty of murder.  The correct result.

The job now is to ensure that no other victim’s family has to endure in court and from the country’s media what Sophie’s family and friends had to endure at the hands of this lowlife and his loathsome lawyer – which means working to remove the (now lessoned) defence of provocation from the books.

UPDATE 2: Greg Edwards, who took down his Facebook group last week at the request of Sophie Elliot’s parents – the narcissist’s lawyers were using it as an excuse to delay the trial – has started a new one: No More Provocation Defence for Murder!!! Enough is enough!!!.  Don’t just get mad, let’s get good law.

UPDATE 3: Perhaps something else for which to use this case as a spur: just consider the legal aid bill that the abominable Ablett-Kerr will now be presenting to taxpayers for an open-and-shut case she dragged out for weeks.

Justice isn’t working

It’s said by someone who should know better [see her 16-page speech here in PDF] that New Zealand must reconsider its whole approach to imprisonment and to the way we “create criminals.”

That we must consider the view that “imprisonment is a symptom of social failure”; that we must look more at the causes of crime rather then the effect of crime on its victims; that instead of locking people up the justice system should instead “find out why blameless babes become criminals”; that “effective rehabilitation” of criminals has suffered since “leadership of the debate about penal policy has passed from officials and professionals . . .  to advocates for victims and safer communities.”

In a complete reversal of cause and effect she asserts that “providing only a prison at the bottom of a cliff is not a solution” because the existence of that prison ensures “criminals will just keep on falling into it.”  In a complete insult to all of us she appears to put criminals and their rehabilitation ahead of the victims of crime and safer communities. And in a complete reversal of the principles of justice she wrings her hands on behalf of “blameless babes” who become criminals and get locked up, while failing to even consider what these “blameless babes” have done to get locked up, and to whom.

This is said by New Zealand’s Chief Justice Sian Elias in an address to the Wellington branch of the Law Society.  It is not her speaking in a personal capacity – it is our Chief Justice ‘speaking with her robes on.’  It is a disgrace.

“Society creates criminals,” she quotes a mentor approvingly, “society must look at the conditions that create them.”  That’s all very well, Ms Chief Justice, but before considering how “society creates criminals,” shouldn’t we – and you – first understand the damage that criminals do the non-criminal members of society. And since you’re the Chief Justice, shouldn’t you at least have some grip on what “justice” actually means?

In that light, I invite Ms Elias to to reflect on why we have a justice system in the first place.  Which is to say, if we follow Thomas Jefferson, to reflect on why we institute governments at all.  To paraphrase Mr Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be demonstrable in reality: that because the mind is our species' means of survival and full flourishing, human beings are individually possessed of certain inalienable rights, which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of private property and happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people . . ; that all laws legislated by governments must be for the purpose of securing these rights; that no laws legislated by government may violate these rights . . .

Seems pretty straightforward.  Almost self-evident, you might say: that we all have rights; that government’s job is to secure those rights; that all laws legislated by governments must be for the purpose of securing these rights; that the agents of government must be agents of right, not of wrong.

So what sort of things violate our rights then?  That’s pretty straightforward too: assault, burglary, fraud, murder, that’s the sort of stuff we want protection from.  That’s the sort of thing for which “governments are instituted among people”: to protect us from our rights being violated: to ensure  “safer communities” (to use the phrase that soured in Ms Elias’s mouth) – i.e., communities in which you and I are safe from being assaulted, burgled or murdered by “blameless babes” and rehabilitating criminals – and the protection of our most basic rights.

This is the primary purpose of governments, and it delineates by extension the primary purpose of the justice system – which is neither to rehabilitate criminals nor to punish them, but to protect us from those who do us over.

Sure, if the rehabilitation of criminals can make us safer then by all means give it a go. And if punishing criminals by hard labour and long sentences will keep them off the streets and away from threatening our loved ones and our property, then that’s something to encourage.   But let’s not overlook the fact that the primary and principled purpose of the justice system is not to reduce the number of criminals, but to reduce the number of victims.

“Our prison system isn’t working,” you say? If it’s keeping at least some criminals off the street, then to that extent at least it is.

Justice delayed is still justice denied, but . . .

I’m in two minds about Simon Power’s latest justice reforms.

A radical review of the welfare system for lawyers that is legal aid is long overdue.  Regular readers of this blog would know that I’ve long been a fan of removing lawyers from sucking off the state’s tit, and replacing legal aid welfare payments with a public defenders’ office.  There’s no species more venal than lawyers making up their bills (un less of course it’s politicians making up their expense claims).

In fact way back in 2005 I wrote that with some very few noticeable exceptions, the more I see of lawyers and their venality, the more I find myself in favour of nationalising the lot of them. When you consider the justice of removing their taxpaid path to riches, you might consider the words of H.L. Mencken:

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.

Ain’t that the truth. Simon Power should send the country’s lawyers a copy of Mencken’s words on a piece of stiff parchment, with the advice that if they disagree with being removed from the state tit that they fold it until it's all sharp corners, and then insert it where the sun doesn't shine.

So legal aid can go.  I’m quite comfortable with the concept of the public defenders’ office instead. But I’m not so happy to see the right to a jury trial so peremptorily dismissed. The right of a person to choose to be tried by a jury of their peers is just one valuable, time-honoured legal protection against innocent people being rail-roaded into prison. 

It is certainly true that the wheels of NZ justice spin slowly – and it’s true too that justice delayed is justice denied.  But the cure for this is not to remove legal protections to make it easier to lock people up – they key fix would be to remove so many of the ridiculous laws on our books that clog the justice system up.  Restrict law only to those that protect individual rights, you can take a chain saw to the country’s statutes.

Back in the 1800s lawyers like Abraham Lincoln could ride around on horseback from trial to trial with only three legal books in his saddlebag, one of those being a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England, the bible of English-speaking law for more than a century.  Right now that lawyer on horseback would have to be a accompanied by a whole wagon train of toadies towing a whole caravan of legal books, if they were to carry with them all the laws that now assail our country.

Start hacking back the intrusions of excessive law and regulation, and you’ll find that courts will unclog themselves very quickly.

Garrett continues to remove all doubt [updated]

ACT’s brave new MP David Garrett continues to defend the indefensible.  Still proudly defending his insistence that the already fairly toothless Bill of Rights Act be further emasculated to suit his view of the importance of individual rights -- “we've got too hung up on people's rights," maintains the “liberal” party’s most unlikely representative -– he’s now got his back even further to the wall, at Lindsay Mitchell’s blog, on the subject of the safety of prisoners. 

In defending his implicit assumption that there’s no one in our jails who are there only for victimless crimes, he makes this explicit challenge to Mike Earley,

if you can draw my attention to anyone who is in jail for "smoking pot" and nothing else, $100 is yours...

Looks like he is as foolish as he is ill-informed. Quick as a flash, Mike obliges.

One begins to realise the beauty of Keith Holyoake’s advice to new MPs to breath through their nose for their first three years.  And also, perhaps, of Mark Twain’s valuable advice to fools.

UPDATE: Liberty Scott clarifies the problem with Mr Garrett’s position:

    It is one thing to say prison shouldn't be comfortable - which is right, it shouldn't have TV, videos and the like. Similarly the smuggling of drugs and cellphones should be stamped upon.
    It is another to be nonchalant about prisoners being raped.
   So now [from the ACT Party and its supporters] we have that it's okay for people to be in prison for growing cannabis for personal use, okay to be in prison for sedition, presumably also for inciting racial disharmony (three months sentence), tax evaders of course, blasphemy can have a prison term (though been a long time since used), as can consensual adults-only incest, as can possession of an erotic story involving consenting adults. . .
    How fucking hard would it be for ACT to, in principle, oppose victimless crimes, while at the same time recognising that some victimless crimes need to be addressed comprehensively. . .  ?

Obviously, no government will be conveniently keeping figures on how many they have incarcerated for victimless crimes, but when I last looked at this question NORML were pointing out that "New Zealand has the highest recorded cannabis arrest rate in the world, at 606 people arrested per 100,000 population per year. The United States is second with 247 arrests per 100,000 population per year."
Not a great statistic in which to come first. NORML's Cannabis Arrest-o-Meter shows too that there have been 123,303 cannabis offences [from 1000 to 2006] and that cannabis offences number just over 80% of all drug offences. So that's an awful lot of victimless arrests.

    As for the prison population ... if you check the recent NZ Corrections Dept stats ... of 6,250 prisoners (costing taxpayers $56,575 per year) they suggest upwards of nine percent of male offenders are incarcerated for drug offences, and eight percent for traffic offences.
    "The main reasons [given] for male imprisonment are: 39 percent for violence offences; 22 percent for sexual violence offences; 22 for property offences (e.g. burglary), 9 percent for drug offences; 8 percent for traffic offences."  Yes, traffic offences.

Meanwhile, Blair Anderson from the Mild Greens has some more recent figures:

Drug offences rose slightly between 2007 and 2008 from 18,908 in 2007 (year ending 30 June) to 19,259 in 2008. Within this overall rise there was a shift in the composition of these offences with more Cannabis related offences (14,449 to 15,288) and fewer offences for other and most often harder, drugs (4,450 to 3,971). Overall the level of drug related crime is 13% lower in 2008 than in 2004 when there were 22,249 drug offences of which 18,271 were Cannabis related.

And Lindsay Mitchell follows up on the point this morning:

First I reiterate a part of a post from earlier in the week;
    "’ The fact is: if you don't want to be assaulted - or worse - by a cellmate, avoid prison by not     committing a crime,’ Mr Garrett said."
My response; 
    “I wonder if Mr Garrett has forgotten that there are people in our prisons who are not violent; people who are guilty only of victimless crimes; people who should properly be in the care of psychiatrists and nursing staff; people who are on remand awaiting trial who may not even be convicted. . .”

And as always, Lindsay likes to base her own case on the figures, and Chris Fowlie at NORML has supplied Lindsay with some numbers from the 2002 Health Select Committee cannabis inquiry report:

p32: "Of the 9,399 prosecutions for the use of cannabis, 6,761 resulted in convictions, and 52 custodial sentences were imposed."

And from parliamentary questions:

Question 8479 (2004) … Paul Swain (Minister of Corrections):
The total number of inmates imprisoned for possession of drugs but not manufacture or supply of drugs in each of the last five years is as follow:
1999 431 inmates
2000 430 inmates
2001 443 inmates
2002 386 inmates
2003 411 inmates
2004 157 inmates (up to 31 May 2004)

As Lindsay says, “While most sentences would have been for drugs other than cannabis, these substantial numbers represent the victimless crimes alluded to.” 

These are just some of the people Mr Garrett and his ACT Party wish to ignore.

And he still owes Mike $100.

The aristocracy of prison management [updated]

To say I’m in favour of privatisation would be somewhat of an understatement.  As far as I’m concerned, if the Beehive was sold off tomorrow and the whole government run out of a prefab in Pigeon Park, then I’d be a happy man.

But I’m not convinced about privatising prisons, or more accurately “contracting out” of prison management, any more than I would be about privatising (or “contracting out”) policemen.

To say it again in case you thought you misread that: I’m not in favour of private prisons.

As always, there’s both a moral and a practical point to make.

The first point to make comes from the very reason we have governments, a point remembered these days more in the breach than the observance: that, for very good reasons, governments have a monopoly on the use of force.

    If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.
    This is the task of government–of a proper government—it’s basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why mean do need a government.
    A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—ie., under objectively defined laws. [Ayn Rand]

This is the difference between private business and the government: it’s the difference between the dollar and the gun.

So what’s morally wrong with private prisons then?  Because, to my mind, it puts the gun in the service of the dollar.  Privatise as much of the existing government as you can, but when you start privatising force, then I’m agin’ you.

That’s the moral argument against private prisons, that it puts the gun in the service of the dollar.  The practical argument is related: that it puts profits at the whim of bureaucratic management.

As Ludwig von Mises points out, profit management is a very different animal to bureaucratic management –- with public-private partnerships we get the worst of both.  As he explains, “the only appropriate method for handling governmental affairs, for which market processes, economic calculation and the profit motive are unable to provide sufficient guidelines … is the employment of bureaucrats and bureaucratic management.”  And it’s true.  When there’s no market, there’s no genuine way to use the profit motive appropriately – and when you do try to use it, by whatever system of contracting out you devise, you still inevitably invite corruption.

We've all heard the stories of the American defence department’s $400 hammers and $640 toilet seats; and we’re all aware that private contractors know how to milk these systems that govt procurement agencies put in place.

No one knows this better than the crony-phony capitalists who survive by leeching off the public purse, those who Rand called the “aristocracy of pull.”

Who knew this better than the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, created and nurtured by the politicians, who then received back some of the profits - “sometimes directly, as campaign funds; sometimes as ‘contributions’ to favored constituents.”

Who knows this better than lawyers, some of the country’s most highly-paid parasites, whose true speciality is in milking the taxpayers' pockets for their own lucrative ends.

And who would know this better than contractors for the management of prisons, whose speciality is to use the power of the gun to their own dollar advantage.

Yes, I agree with competition, and it's true that private prisons can operate more efficiently, and have done.   But if government is inefficient at managing prisons themselves –- and no one knows this better than Barry Matthews himself -– then why should we expect it to be any more efficient at producing the contracts to run private prisons?  As Cato’s Bruce Benson points out, “In anarchy (and indeed, any private market) the good or service is being supplied in response to the demands of private individuals,” whereas when the demand comes wholly from monopsonistic bureaucratic management financed out of the taxpayers’ pocket, the services provided are quite different.

But even when they do mange to efficiently write and supervise a prison contract without a private contractor running rings around them, and let’s concede that some have done, it’s not right. Efficiency is not the primary aim of government, and in any case, it crucially depends on accurately answering the question ‘efficient at what?’.  If Hitler had “contracted out” the management of the Holocaust, undoubtedly the killing would have been more efficient, but it wouldn’t have made it any less horrific.

Too say it again, efficiency is not the primary aim of government; protection of individual rights is. That’s too important to be bought and sold at the whim of a bureaucrat and the behest of an aristocrat of pull.

[And let me leave you with this last question: given all the problems I’ve identified with ‘privatising’ prisons, why is this the only privatisation that’s even on the horizon of this new government -- when there’s so many other parts of government just crying out to be sold off or canned?  Answer that one for me, and I’ll be an even happier man.]

UPDATE:  Anti Dismal links to most of the blogs who’ve handled this topic, and reckons “much heat” has been shed on the topic, but “very little light.”  That includes the contribution of yours truly.  Oh well. Anti Dismal offers a substantial contribution to the debate, concluding,

there is a case to be made for private prisons, but it may not be as strong as for other services currently provided by the government, and it is at its weakest for the case of maximum security prisons.

Laura Norder wins elections

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. To my great surprise, John Boy Key appears to be sending that very sensible message to violent criminals, and to shop-owners and others who've been the target of those criminals he's sending the message (well, sort of) that it's okay to defend themselves.

Bravo for that much.

John Boy has finally come out with a policy that's both worth a damn, and is different to the other team's. Yes, it's election year, but two cheers for that anyway. It's been twelve years since Libertarianz first introduced its policy that "Life sentences for real crimes will mean life" -- unlike other parties I could mention it's not changed every few years depending on which way the wind is blowing -- so it's worth a cheer or two when the mainstream parties finally catch up.

National's policy of ensuring, or trying to, that thugs won't get the chance to destroy people's lives *more than twice* is half-good, and will keep the rest of us half-safe. Two very loud cheers for that.

Contrary to the claims of both Helen Clark MP and Peter Williams QC in objecting to his policy, "corrections" isn't about "redemption" or rehabilitation for criminals -- and contrary to John Key's claim it's not primarily about "deterrence" either -- it's primarily about restitution for victims, and then protection for us.

The only reason not to take violent criminals off the street -- the only reason -- is that not doing so would safely allow a criminal to make recompense for their crime to the victim.

Government's primary job -- the only one for which it has any moral justification -- is to protect those who value their life, liberty, property and happiness from those who've shown beyond reasonable doubt that they're quite partial to taking them all away. ("The rights of the accused are not a primary," argues Ayn Rand, "they are a consequence derived from a man’s inalienable, individual rights. A consequence cannot survive the destruction of its cause.") That's the only reason to lock people up: not to not to rehabilitate criminals, and nor even to punish them, but to protect us from their savagery.

If John Key understands that much, then he perhaps understands more than I'd ever given him credit for.

That said, Key still resolutely ignores a fairly significant elephant in the room, and his policy has a fairly substantial fish-hook -- its price-tag: at least $314 million plus $43 million annually for a new prison to lock up the estimated 572 or so thugs that will be locked up under this policy who aren't locked up now.

That's why he gets just two cheers. Ignoring the obvious, and a new prison that's both expensive and unnecessary. Repairing to the reason we have laws against violent crime will tell you why it's unnecessary:

All actions defined as criminal in a free society are actions involving force—and only such actions are answered by force.

Do not be misled by sloppy expressions such as “A murderer commits a crime against society.” It is not society that a murderer murders, but an individual man. It is not a social right that he breaks, but an individual right. He is not punished for hurting a collective—he has not hurt a whole collective—he has hurt one man. If a criminal robs ten men—it is still not “society” that he has robbed, but ten individuals. There are no “crimes against society”—all crimes are committed against specific men, against individuals. And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack—against force.

Which means "crimes" without a victim are not in fact a crime -- "crimes," that is, such as smoking a joint, cutting down a tree on your own land, or putting a chocolate bar in your kid's lunchbox. Locking people up who've committed no crime against anyone else is not only immoral, its not only expensive, but it's urgently necessary to solve the problems Key seems at least to want to.

The main point here is of course the failed War on Drugs, whose results we can see on the streets of South Auckland and the gangs of Wanganui, in the increased profits of those gangs and the increased abundance of more and more dangerous drugs -- in the increased time taken away from real crimes by concentrating on bogus victimless crimes; in the rise and rise of 'P' -- the ideal prohibition drug -- and in the explosion of prison numbers in recent years.

It's now so serious that even a mainstream political parties really has to focus attention on what the War on Drugs has done, and how ending it will solve so many problems:

• End the War on Drugs to fix the gang problem, by taking away their source of profits.
• End the War on Drugs to fix the 'p' problem by taking away the need for such a *virulent* drug -- the ideal prohibition drug.
• End the War on Drugs to fix the prison overcrowding problem, by not locking up people who have committed no crime against anyone.
• End the War on Drugs to solve the policing problem, by taking police resources from so called 'crimes' with no victims so that real crimes with genuine victims like rape, robbery, murder, theft and fraud can be vigorously pursued and the rights of these real victims enforced and upheld.

UPDATE 1: More on the damage that dullards do:

BZP ban boosted the illegal drug market, survey shows - A survey of Otago University students has found the ban on party pill ingredient BZP has only boosted the illegal drug market. [Hat tip Whale Oil]

UPDATE 2: Lindsay Mitchell reckons the Nats "two strikes" policy has gazumped her own party's "three strikes" headline policy. "Clever move by National," she says. "Makes ACT irrelevant on the very ground they chose to fight the election on."

Where ACT should have gone [she says] is to the root of most crime and the best way to prevent it: Serious and radical welfare reform. National would never follow them there.

Thanks goodness one party at least has pointed out that road, huh?

But as Susan says at Lindsay's, why stop at two strikes?

I don't know why you'd subject another one (or two, in the case of ACT) innocent people to a serious [violent] offence before locking the offender away for a long time?
Why not get serious with the first conviction for violent crime?

As long as the justice system is fixed first and it's restricted to violent crimes only, why not?

"Lock up the bloggers"

Further to yesterday's post about Euro MPs looking to ban troublesome Eurobloggers, vocal Malaysian blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin was locked up this morning for two years in a high security prison as, according to the Malaysian Home Minister "police had found concrete evidence that his postings in the Malaysia Today blogsite were prejudicial to the security of the country." Malaysian blogger Rocky Bru has background [hat tip Lady Lavender, who points out even Malaysia's draconian Internal Security Act (which allows detention without trial) does not deter blogcitizens from lambasting the ruling Malay party - "once a sacred subject no one is allowed to criticise."]

Don't be complacent. Politicians really dislike criticism, and if they can close it down, they will. Or try to.

The Hive asks what the New Zealand government is doing about this. Whale Oil answers: "They are reviewing broadcasting and web rules."

NB: Sign the petition to free Raja Petra Kamaruddin, Teresa Kok and Others Held Under Malaysia's Internal Security Act.

UPDATE 1: Since so many worldwide appear wholly unfamiliar with the concept of free speech, except in the breach, might I humbly suggest they begin their understanding of this basic pillar of freedom with this post on Some Propositions on Free Speech, which lays out the legitimate moral parameters of free speech.

UPDATE 2: Welcome Rocky's Bru readers. Feel free to stick around and, in particular, to check out all the posts here ast NOT PC on Free Speech and Sedition. Perhaps I could invite you to begin with this 'Cue Card Libertarianism' post on Persuasion versus Force.

UPDATE 3:  Contemplate these thoughts:

Forcing people to bite their tongues produces only a "veneer of tolerance concealing a snakepit of unaired and unchallenged views."
- Rowan Atkinson

It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?
- Stephen Fry

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
- Salman Rushdie

UPDATE 4:  How often when the rubber hits the road do we discover who really has the courage of their convictions.  'The People's Parliament' wonders whether RPK was emboldened by reading too much into all thee declarations of support from his readers -- support that seems to be withering on the vine now he's in detention.

    And reading too much, he asked of the millions of MT readers for 150,000 signatures for the petition to the Agong in relation to the judiciary, and got 25,700++*?
    What could we all possibly have meant by these declarations of solidarity and support if the petition demanding his release from ISA detention, now four days old, has garnered 20,463 signatures?
    Just what do we mean [by "support"]?

What sort of "support" is it that people demonstrate when even something as simple as signing an online petition is too much!  Let them hear the words of liberated American slave, Frederick Douglass:

    The whole history of progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
    This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
--Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

* As of 10pm Friday morning 26/6/08 NZ time, the petition stands at 29,112 signatures.

"What can we do to win the war against the drug P?"

With commendable honesty Minister Annette King confesses that the War on the Drug P is already lost.  The Herald follows up and asks, "What can we do to win the war against the drug P?"

Have they ever considered that this is a war than can't be won?  That the real damage is done by the War on Drugs itself? As Milton Friedman once told Bush Snr’s drugs tsar Bill Bennett, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”

I won't bore you with another reiteration of the arguments why the War on Drugs can't win (you can read most of my previous posts here), but just consider these few pointers:

• Since the government can't even keep drugs out of prisons, how can they keep them off the street?
• Removing the legal market for recreational drugs (even relatively benign party pills) has created an illicit one, run by criminals.
• Banning and arrests only reduces supply.  Since it does nothing to reduce demand, what do you think that does to price, and the profits of drug suppliers?
• Since banning and arresting drug suppliers puts police in conflict with huge amounts of money, what do you think this does to police morals (hint: Clint Rickards was once an undercover cop).
• Outlawing drugs leaves drugs in the hands of outlaws -- with huge profits driven by the reduced supply. (All praise the War on Drugs.)
• Criminals have no interest in things like quality control, honesty about the composition of a substance, or refraining from selling to children. (All praise the War on Drugs.)
• Outlawing drugs only increases the virulence of recreational drugs.  As Milton Friedman explained with his Iron Law of Prohibition, 'P' is precisely the sort of drug you get when you start a War on Drugs, since the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes.
• If it is impossible to win the war on drugs, and no government anywhere ever has, then the question surely becomes: should we have a legal, transparent, accountable market for drugs, or an illegal, secretive, unaccountable one?

So what do you think? Could it be that what's too often overlooked in the link everyone sees between illegal drugs and crime is the 'illegal' rather than the drugs?  That's certainly the position of the cops and former cops  from an organisation called LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) who argue that, "We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction, as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition."

In the end, none of these practical arguments will convince a soul, not as long as good people are convinced the health of their soul depends on having drugs banned. In other words, not as long as the morality behind the war on drugs remains unchallenged.  In the end, here's the telling point: That consenting adults have the right to make our own choices for ourselves, and we do. As with alcohol use, so too with drug use: youngsters need to be able to see both responsible drug use, and people saying no because they want to say no, not because their free will has been lobotomised.

Perhaps if you won't listen to the cops or to people like Friedman, you'll listen instead to the criminals:'
                                         

Another iron law of prohibition

Here's another 'iron law' of prohibition: you can pass all the laws you want enforcing prohibition, but no law on earth can make prohibition work.

You want some proof? Here's a sample from the Sunday Star Times, from an interview with a prisoner:

Prison's where you go to get drugs. It's incredible, I've never had drugs in my life. I had the opportunity to experience every type if I'd have wanted.

The point is that talk about drug laws should start at the point of what's possible. If you can't even ban drugs from prisons, then how on earth do you think you can ban them from a free society?

NB. Phil's comment below is exactly right: "If it is impossible to ban drugs, then the question becomes: should we have a legal, transparent, accountable market for drugs, or an illegal, secretive, unaccountable one?"

Your call.

RELATED: Victimless Crimes

Go to jail!

I expect you've already heard about the Government's shake-up of sentencing and imprisonment. DPF has a summary of the main points, and he gives marks to each of them.

I just want to reflect on the point of a criminal justice system. What is the primary purpose of a 'corrections' system? Is to to punish? Is it to rehabilitate?

No, it is to protect the rest of us from the criminal.

And what should be the primary intention with sentencing? The sentence should ensure 1) that the rest of us are made safe from the criminal; 2) that no criminal achieves any value from his crime; and 3) as far as possible, no victim is worse off for it. Remember the victims?

Part of the motivation for the proposed changes is to fix the problem of New Zealand's overflowing prisons. However, as I said when Damien O'Connor first proposed this brave new regime, if you withdrew all offences for which there are no victims and granted those people imprisoned just for those non-offences-- ie., just for victimless crimes -- you could easily free up a large portion of the prison capacity, and then you wouldn't have to reduce sentences by 25%. And then our protection from real, dangerous criminals would be much better ensured.

UPDATE 1: Whale Oil has obtained a copy of the proposed guidelines for judges so their sentence can match the offence. Sample:

Stealing taxpayer money: What money, we just changed the law to 'validate' that.

UPDATE 2: Links to previous posts added, and text slightly revised.

LINKS: Criminal justice system - Kiwiblog (David Farrar)
Government meddles with sentencing - Whale Oil

RELATED AT 'NOT PC': Lock 'em up; free the others - Not PC (Feb, 2006)
While we're talking about rehabilitation for prisoners - Not PC (Feb 2006)
Crimes against society - Not PC (March 2006)
Prison overcrowding - Not PC (May 2005)

TAGS: Politics-NZ, Law