THE PRESS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1980. Offenders and sentences

Press, 5 September 1980, Page 12

THE PRESS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1980. Offenders and sentences

The member of Parliament for Hamilton West, Mr M. J. Minogue, earlier this week added his voice to many qthers who have in recent years expressed their concern that New Zealand has so many offenders in prison and that so many of those in prison are yoimg, or Maori, or both. It is possible, to agree with Mr . Minogue that too many young offenders are sent to prison without ' accepting his explanation—that they have been inadequately defended in court or have too readily pleaded guilty. It could equally well be said that New Zealand has a high per capita prison population not because it has slapdash lawyers but because it has an efficient police force.

The serious point is that New Zealand’s prison population is relatively high and might be reduced without any undue risk, to law and order and with possible benefit to the offenders themselves and .the community. It is now widely accepted—and certainly correct —that a prison sentence often does not have much reforming value and that the relatively large sums spent on keeping certain classes of offenders in prison could better be spent on preventive measures which are insufficiently adopted in New Zealand at present.

The most obvious and most frequently proposed way of reducing the number of people in prison is to allow for alternative sentences which provide better opportunities, for reform than a term in prison and still protect the community. Both the Minister and the Secretary for Justice have supported' the investigation of effective alternatives to a prison sentence and the Government has a review of penal policy under way.. Although the sentence of community work provided for in the Criminal • Justice Amendment ‘(No. 2) Bill is no great advance.on probation of periodic detention; it has been a small step in the right direction.

In his comments on this bill, one of Mr Minogue’s main arguments was that too many people are in prison not because alternative sentences are not available but because the offenders should not have come up for sentencing at all. The; number of people who end up in prison because they are inadequately defended in court is probably very small. To have even a small number of people in this category is wrong and the Government should overhaul the legal aid system if it can be shown that people are being .wrongly convicted, or, on sentencing, are not being given a fair hearing. The Legal, Aid Board has recommended that,, because many in the community are’ unaware of what the scheme can offer, an effort should be made to publicise it. *

i In his comments on the bill, Mr Minogue also raised a question that should be troubling the community more than it appears to be: the large proportion of young Maori males in prison. This is emphatically not a problem that can be brushed aside merely by saying that these prisoners were not adequately defended in court or solved solely by introducing new sentences •which can be imposed on Madris alone. There is something distasteful about the idea proposed by Mr Minogue this week, and earlier by the Secretary for Justice, that certain Maori offenders

should be returned to .their families rather than sent to prison. No good reason exists for requiring Maori families to bear the responsibilities and costs of rehabilitating their errant members which pakeha families are to be spared. In devising alternative sentences to prison, it might be possible to provide Maori offenders with opportunities to express remorse, shame and guilt, which in a Maori setting could have a more powerful rehabilitative effect than it would in a pakeha context. The success of such an approach would . depend entirely on individual assessment of cases and the known influence of distinct Maori attitudes. Racially discriminatory sentences should be approached very cautiously and only with the full and voluntary support of the different racial groups to which the distinctive sentences could be applied. If, of course, an offender-is convinced that his conviction —or . the law —is unjust in any event, there is little point in relying on such approach.

Grappling with this problem of the high proportion of Maori offenders who end up in New Zealand’s courts demands the devotion of greater attention and of human and financial resources to resolving or ameliorating the social problems which give rise to Maori offending. One reason why there are; proportionately far more Maori than pakeha offenders may be that the law fails to take account of peculiarly Maori standards and ways of behaving. In different situations, and for very complex historical reasons, Maoris are being required, to conform to standards and a culture that is still in important ways alien or uncomfortable to them. The Race Relations Office is at present investigating, the country’s system of justice with a view to establishing where an appropriate “cultural input” can be made with a view to easing this problem. Some attention must be paid to the predominant charges on which Maori offenders find themselves before the courts. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the most ardent advocate of Maoridom will urge major or discriminatory changes in the law on the crimes of violence.

This approach will. have to be adopted alongside efforts to assist Maori individuals and families to overcome other social, educational, apd economic disadvantages which probably go much further towards explaining the high proportion of Maoris in the country’s prisons. Approaching the problem along these lines will be a difficult, delicate task. It promises much more effective, if slower, solutions to the problem posed by the number of Maori offenders than either ensuring that the offenders are more expensively defended or introducing racially discriminatory sentences.

. The community is hardly likely to favour a legal aid scheme which, at community expense, prises offenders out of the courts on legal technicalities expensively introduced by defence counsel. The suspicion will always be, if discriminatory sentences are resorted to, that , the community has pushed the problem aside, on to the shoulders of Maori parents, because it is reluctant to tackle the difficult task of compensating for the disadvantages of many Maoris in New Zealand and of taking proper account of cultural differences in this country. ■