Let’s look on the bright side. The people voted this way (quite significantly) so they must be seeing something positive there. I already know all the downsides so let’s discuss the upsides.
Let’s look on the bright side. The people voted this way (quite significantly) so they must be seeing something positive there. I already know all the downsides so let’s discuss the upsides.
This is all very well and good, but the evidence shows harsher prison sentences does little to reduce crime rates.
Longer sentences do not function as a deterrent, that’s true. It does, however, mean offenders cannot commit violent crimes, and in general be a menace to society, from behind bars.
If you’re saying National will punish violent offenders more than they are, but keep the current incarceration levels, then I’d agree with that sentiment.
Of course there is the problem of completely understaffed prisons at the moment, but that is a problem regardless of the colour of the tie of the PM.
Our incarceration rate will no doubt go up, but I, and most NZers I suspect, accept that.
I agree most will. My only problem is it doesn’t solve the underlying problems, it just puts more burden on the taxpayer.
Ultimately, I agree violent and sexual crimes are being sentenced too lightly, but outside of this I would prefer to address the problems that cause crime (poverty, education, etc etc). We don’t need to be locking up kids, because it does more harm than good. I’m happy to lock up rapists though, for example.
What happens to their kids?
Do you think their kids are better off with or without a parent like that in their lives?
The parent doesn’t get removed from their life. What happens is the kid grows up thinking the law is stupid and police are the enemy, because they have to see their parent once a week at a scheduled meeting instead of them being able to have the parent support them at their rugby game on Saturday.
They don’t hate the parent, they hate the justice system that locked them up for the childs entire childhood because of one stupid thing they did as a young adult that didn’t even hurt anyone except the insurance company (and they only hear one side of the story so you can’t argue back on that).
And that parent gets out of jail at 30, has no friends except from prison, and they can’t find a job because of their criminal record. They end up in a life of crime, in and out of prison, and their kid follows in their footsteps.
Contrast this to the parent that did the same crime, did some home-d but could keep their job and be therefore their kid. They realised it was dumb, the kid grew up away from the prison system, learnt that police are not the enemy, and neither the parent or child ended up in a lifetime of crime.
By the third generation, you have kids who have never known crime.
But that is so, so many election cycles away, and polititions are calling for blood on people who seem different to us, so people vote for it. Meanwhile business is booming in the for-profit prison, and yet crime rates haven’t gone down because statistically “hard on crime” approaches only have short term impacts on crime.
Sorry, but even most children would see this as absolute nonsense, especially if this was a violent crime.
You’re reeeally giving this hypothetical person the benefit of the doubt by assuming they’d be present in the child’s life in a positive way.
If they learn the first time, sure. How many chances do you think people deserve?
Children take things at face value. Adults can use data to show that imprisoning more people doesn’t lead to lower crime rates except in the short term.
You’ve also changed the goal posts. Most crime is not violent crime.
I’m sorry, but you are assuming bad faith. Not everyone who breaks the law is a bad person. They only need to be a better role model out of prison than they would be in prison, and with that we get generational change. It takes time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
It’s also important to note that women’s brains don’t finish developing until around their early 20s, and men their late 20s. Young people are dumb, and it’s not their fault. Someone who was an idiot at 20 can be a positive role model at 25, but not if they are in prison.
More than National and Act are willing to give them. They tried sending youths to boot camps last time they were power. The only thing it did was buy them votes, it did nothing for crime so it got shut down. Now they tested to see if the same thing works twice, apparently it does, so now we have to run a boot camp for another couple of years until we see it’s still not working.
We are operating a US style prison system, and until Labour took over we had an imprisonment rate almost as high, one of the highest in the developed world. I would much prefer a Scandinavian style system, where we accept people make mistakes and we try to give them the support to reintegrate in society. They do this for violent criminals including murderers, but I’d be happy if we at least started somewhere, and keeping non-violent criminals out of prison would be a great start.
And don’t even get me started on victims rights. Most criminals, and especially most violent criminals, are themselves victims, and no one seems interested in their rights.
Reducing crime requires small improvements over generations, not throwing more people in prison.
You’re vastly underestimating how much insight most children have to how the world works, in my view.
For example, I knew my father was often full of shit in my early teens.
It’s really interesting. I somewhat recently read a book about raising children, where a researcher talked about studies they did with kids. Kids understand a lot, at a young age (I think they did the studies on kids around ages 3-5). Kids will humour you, instinctively pretending they believe you, because it’s still helping them learn about the world. I know that kids are often smarter than adults 🙂
But it’s really obvious that putting people in prison for crimes will reduce the crime rate. It’s so obvious, it’s almost impossible to believe it’s not true. Neither kids nor adults are good at spotting counterintuitive things like that. The only reason we know it’s true is because of the vast data collection done these days (Probably best not to get me started on the involuntary data collection/data sovereignty).
Not only does throwing more people in prison for longer not reduce crime, it doesn’t even reduce violent crime. It literally does nothing more than cost the tax payer money, and satisfy a medieval sense of vengeance.
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It would be nice if he had any evidence whatsoever to back it up, but nobody in this thread seems to have any evidence behind them.
The closest anyone has come is some very tenuous evidence that long prison sentences don’t serve as a deterrent, which ignores the fact that it does keep offenders away from the general public for as long as possible.
There are plenty, but here’s some, and also here, and here.
Once again, you conveniently ignore the fact that, while prison may not have a dramatic effect on recidivism rates, something that evidence from other commenters contradicts, there is the little fact that offenders can’t commit these acts from behind bars.
At worst, it puts the damage they do to society on pause for a while.
That’s a cool opinion piece, but here is some actual science:
“The results support the hypothesis that perceived severity, at relatively high levels of perceived certainty, has a significant deterrent effect."
“The Commission consistently found that incarceration lengths of more than 120 months had a deterrent effect. Specifically, offenders incarcerated for more than 60 months up to 120 months were approximately 17 percent less likely to recidivate relative to a comparison group sentenced to a shorter period of incarceration. For incarceration lengths of 60 months or less, the Commission did not find any statistically significant criminogenic or deterrent effect.”
“Finally, I reanalyze data that appear to be consistent with the greater weight for certainty than severity argument and show that the evidence does not support that inference. Potential criminals mentally combine the three deterrence components—regardless of whether they are risk neutral, averse, or acceptant. I conclude by considering what it means to a worldly application of criminal deterrence theory to place equal weight on the certainty and the severity of punishment.”
“Increased average prison sentences (severity) reduce burglary only.”
“Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion.”
I’m definitely saving this post for later, thanks for the quality sources.
I’ll need to give those a read tomorrow. And possibly save them for the next time someone spouts nonsense at me.
We are having an interesting discussion about these sources here. It might provide you with more information and context.
Only the second article has any real support for the claims, and that just shows that criminals who are sentenced for 10 years or more a much less likely to reoffend than those sentenced less. This is almost certainly just backing up a known fact that people convicted of any violent offense are less likely to be re-arrested in the years after release than those convicted of property, drug, or public order offenses.
I posted a new Zealand article that was easier to read, the study the article drew it’s conclusions from was this study by the U.S. Department of Justice.
I can’t access this article to investigate further, but I will point out is from the 1980, which is over 40 years ago. I will also point out that their main concern was concerned with “the rational image of man in utilitarian thought, the philosophical framework in which modern deterrence theory is grounded.” which does not sound very data driven.
This is definitely an interesting article. After reading further, it appears to show a statistically significant relationship between longer prison sentences and reduced recidivism. This effect is really only shown above 5 years, and specifically above 10 years. I did not see in this study where they tracked increased punishment for the same crime. Simply put, they showed that criminals who commit serious crimes and are incarcerated from 5 to more than 10 years will recommit fewer crimes than criminals incarcerated for less time. This doesn’t suggest increasing punishments for lesser crimes, unless you want to lock ram raiders up for over 10 years.
This study does not imply at all that increased punishments lead to lower crime. It is talking about considerations and assumptions made when making studies to inform policy, and suggesting that (to paraphrase) it’s more complicated than one single thing.
“In line with previous research, we find that detection plays a consistent role in reducing acquisitive crime, but that severity of sanctions is ambiguous.”
They do not claim any certainly over decreased crime rates, and in fact say that the data is “ambiguous”.
Here’s a bonus article from Australia.
Of course there will be the odd study that shows a slight drop in crime, but overwhelmingly they do not. By far the biggest effect is post-prison rehabilitation.
This isn’t a study. It’s a press release. There are some citations down the bottom. Which one(s) do you believe support your premise?
Why do you think a 40 year old study on human behaviour is suddenly invalid? Have humans evolved so spectacularly over 40 years that we no longer respond to negative and positive stimuli the same way? That’s a while claim requiring some wild evidence.
It doesn’t explicitly show that locking ram-raiders up for longer reduces recidivism or propensity to offend. I provided it to refute the your claim that “the evidence shows harsher prison sentences does little to reduce crime rates.” It does do that.
My argument is precisely that it is more complicated than one single thing. I am not arguing that severity is the only proven effective deterrence method. In fact, certainty of conviction is even more effective! You argued that severity does little to deter crime. I am providing evidence that it does. You can read the full study here if interested. From the conclusion:
They found a correlation with severity and burglary only in this study. That does not mean a correlation for other crimes is absent. Remember: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Even if the correlation were only present for burglary, I would be very happy with fewer burglaries.
I refer you to page 178. The rate of incarceration only began to meaningfully increase in the 80s. It is well established that criminal policies rarely immediately affect social change. This often takes many years or decades, which is what we see in the data. I grant that sociological studies on criminology are very difficult to attenuate noise, but we don’t and cannot have controlled studies. In this case the methodology looks good, and it’s extremely well cited. Indeed, this is a far higher level of rigour than I am used to seeing in criminological research. If you wish to throw out this study on the premise you argue, we may as well throw out the entire school of sociology and criminology.
I read the study.
The research is encouraging, and I hope we see more of it. However it is hardly conclusive, and it certainly doesn’t indicate we should ignore sentence severity as a necessary and critical component of deterrence.
“Findings show a decrease in self-reported offending over time by the most serious adolescent offenders, the relative inefficacy of longer juvenile incarcerations in decreasing recidivism, the effectiveness of community-based supervision as a component of aftercare for incarcerated youth, and the effectiveness of substance abuse treatment in reducing both substance use and offending by serious adolescent offenders.”
“Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior. This conclusion is not sufficiently firm to guide policy generally, though it casts doubt on claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects.”
People haven’t changed, of course, but society has changed a lot since the early 80s. Any data from such a study is limited to the 80s and earlier. This doesn’t entirely invalidate any findings (whatever they are, since we can’t read the actual article), but it means we should weigh more recent studies more highly.
Firstly, I will acknowledge that I should have been more careful with my statement. Thank you for keeping me intellectually honest. I should have said “studies do not support the finding that increasing sentences leads to reduced crime rates”, which is a slightly different statement.
That being said, the study does not support this. It shows that criminals who are imprisoned longer are less likely to re-offend, it does not show that increasing prison sentences reduces crime. These are not the same things. For example, longer prison sentences tend to be for violent crimes, but it is a known effect that violent crime offenders have lower recidivism following incarceration than non-violent offenders.
The article does not support your assertions. In fact, your statement that ‘certainty of conviction is even more effective than fear of punishment’ is precisely what the article questions. Its conclusion is, to paraphrase, that criminals do not weigh risk of being caught and severity of punishment if they are caught differently, but rather they are all equally weighted, and that policy should not weigh one factor above the other. Crucially, it says nothing about the actual importance of these factors to criminals. Equal weighting can still be 0. In the end, all it says is that criminals are complicated, and that many things factor into their propensity to commit crime. I agree with this, but it does not support the idea that harsher punishments will reduce crime rates.
Absence of evidence is exactly what I’m arguing. There is an absence of good evidence that increasing punishments will lower crime. There is concrete evidence, however, that post-incarceration interventions lower recidivism. Also, you cannot take part of the data and ignore the rest, which is exactly why they conclude that there is not enough of an effect to draw a conclusion based on their findings. In other words, their findings do not show a statistically significant effect that increasing punishments lowers crime rate.
There is a lot going on in this article, and it would far to long to analyze everything in-depth right now. So, instead, I will provide two more recent studies which contradict certain aspects of the findings here. I could do more but I need to work.
This 2019 study found that, contrary to the article being discussed, legalizing abortion had a large effect in reducing over all crime.
This report found only a 5% effect of increased incarceration in the drop in violent crime from 1990 to 2000, and after that no effect at all. Additional to this, the exact same drop in violent crime in Canada was observed over the same time period, with no increase in incarceration rate, casting doubt into the effect it played in a global trend.
That was not the only study. This one discusses the effect of in-prison physical and mental health to recidivism.. This review concludes that post-release programmes have a positive impact on recidivism in most western countries.. This Scottish review concludes that, while there are many factors, “Rehabilitative interventions with the strongest evidence base for reducing reconviction rates are cognitive-behavioural programmes which address criminogenic needs.”
Overall, there is not, in my opinion and the opinion of the Department of Corrections, the evidence that increasing the severity of punishments reduces crime, and that the greatest effect is addressing the causes of crime in the first place.
I apologise that I haven’t provided a follow-up. They keep me very busy at work. I will try to check back in over the weekend to respond in kind. I would like to thank you for staying respectful and data-driven, even when I was not always equally respectful.
No worries mate, I understand. I’m happy to file this under ‘agree to disagree’ also, as I’m sure we all have better things to do with our time than argue on the internet!
To be fair, you are the first one I’ve had discussions of this sort with online who cites any kind of evidence at all, other than feelings. A breath of fresh air.
Homie, watching you get shut down by actual evidence has been brilliant to watch.
Fact is, violent crime is up under Labour, whatever the underlying cause may be, and the current approach isn’t working.
If I am presented with compelling evidence, I will change my view. So far, nothing he has supplied has in any meaningful way supported the assertion that longer prison sentences lowers crime rates.
You are absolutely right, violent crime has risen recently. But instead of just blaming the incumbent, perhaps we should be lookings the broader picture as to why this has happened? Do we know a ‘tough on crime’ policy would not have seen the same rise in crime? No, we do not. However, many of the things Labour has been implementing have proven effects in lowering crime and recidivism.
There is no amount of evidence that you will not dismiss offhand as “inconclusive”, while using equally vague evidence to support your own argument.
That simply isn’t true, but you can think whatever you want. Just because I don’t agree with your conclusions does not mean I am dogmatic about it.
I remain unconvinced. Many experts remain unconvinced. The justice department remains unconvinced. Many other governments remain unconvinced. That is enough for me.