Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Brilliant Day | Jul 14, 2004 09:41

Auckland Zoo was brilliant yesterday. The welcome winter sun seemed to have stirred every bird and beastie into action.

The emus, with their big, amber eyes, stuck their beaks over the barriers at small children; the kaka in the aviary swooped down and perched at our elbows to eat; the lion cubs, only a few days out in the open, played and bumbled around as if they were in a Disney film; and the sealions swooped joyously past their viewing window. The golden lion tamarins gathered in sunny spots on branches, glowing as if the light were their own, and the gorgeous Himalayan monal had more neon than Las Vegas.

This was all good. With my co-director working offsite, I am the sole responsible adult at Dubwise Towers these school holidays. The kids have actually been pretty agreeable, in part because I've largely let them do their favourite things: lazing around playing games and watching DVDs. This makes me a bad parent. But, hell, it's their holiday. And I do get them outside to shoot hoops and stroll around the zoo and stuff.

Anyway, Alex Spence, who has been researching a couple of relevant storiesfor The Listener and Metro, had some observations on the ropey benefit numbers cited by National this week, and Katherine Rich's speech in particular:

I'm glad you mentioned, even in passing, that some of the welfare growth over the past decade or so has been due to the transition of mental health services from institutions to community care. I've been researching the plight of those with a chronic, severe mental illness since the end of last year, particularly with regard to poverty and unemployment so this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine.

In Rich's speech, she talks about the "explosion" in the number of people on the sickness and invalids benefit, from 17,000 in 1975 to 115,000 today. I can only talk about the psychiatric illness component (which accounts for a quarter of invalids beneficiaries and a third of sickness beneficiaries) but I have to say, it concerns me that any politician would lump sickness and invalids beneficiaries in with those who are simply unemployed, using the rise in the number of people receiving those benefits as some kind of proof of a rise in indolence and wastefulness.

It may well be true that it's easier to receive a sickness benefit now than it was in 1975, but Rich ignores a number of complex reasons why the rolls have increased: first, as you point out, nobody with a mental illness lives in an institution any more. But moreover, the recognition of psychiatric disorders has increased several-fold since 1975. In those days, someone with debilitating depression, for instance, probably wouldn't have sought or received treatment or even a diagnosis, let alone been given time off work to recover.

Also, there is very clear evidence that the rates of illnesses like depression are increasing independent of social attitudes and access to treatment. Of course, you can get into an argument about whether society has become too ready to pathologise what is essentially ordinary human experience, and that diagnoses such as stress are open to exploitation. But that's a whole different ballgame than saying Labour has allowed the number of invalids beneficiaries to increase simply because it wants to encourage dependency. The phenomenon exists regardless of who is in government.

Rich talked about the rise of various kinds of welfare, but then proceeded to talk about implementing "work for the dole" without specifying who, exactly, it would apply to. I'm assuming Rich was only mentioning sickness beneficiaries to make a convenient point, and not actually suggesting they would be made to work for their benefit. I mean, that would just be daft beyond belief. It's true that most people with a mental illness want to work, but it's not nearly as simple as that.

Alex goes on to talk about Ministry of Social Development's new initiatives in "supported employment" ("ie, trying to put people in real jobs, where they'll be earning real wages, rather than letting them fester in sheltered workshops for less than $50 a week"). I won't blow the Listener story he has coming up next week, but, he says, "there is no silver bullet. Make Katherine Rich the minister tomorrow and she would have no better, swifter solution."

And, in conclusion:

At one of the drop-in centres I went to earlier this year, I sat in on a group counselling session for guys who live either on the streets or in scumhole boarding houses. They were all on benefits, all had alcohol and gambling problems, most had spent years living on the streets and had done time in jail, and all of them were dealing with voices and hallucinations. Yet they were marvellous company: friendly, lively, funny and insightful. I'd love to see Katherine Rich visit these guys, sit there for an hour and listen to them recount in the most humbling terms the fucked up tragedies of their lives, then lecture them about welfare dependence. Sure, she probably would claim these are the guys who genuinely need the safety net. But in that case, make the distinction. Don't lump all beneficiaries in together just because it's politically convenient.

We actually tried to get Rich to come on my Wire show on 95bFM today to talk about this sort of thing, but her press secretary said she was in the South Island "with her mobile phone switched off" - and in any case would not wish to pre-empt her leader's forthcoming announcements on welfare. I have some misgivings about the practice of making a speech like that and then going to ground, but I expect we'll eventually be allowed to discuss it in the course of National's next marketing round.

It turns out that Simon Pound, the host of the Thursday Wire on bFM, has been quietly keeping a blog. Allow me to out him by pointing to a good little post in which he, a Don Brash fan ("I love the idea of a libertarian in charge of the only big conservative party. It is great news"), gloomily ponders the National Party's lurch into base social conservatism "through stealing the unattractive ideas of the two most unattractive parties in parliament."

I agree: I thought Brash would bring some intellectual interest to New Zealand politics. The reverse appears to have happened.

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The News | Jul 13, 2004 10:19

Righto: APN has signed off on plans for its new Sunday newspaper, which will publish out of the New Zealand Herald's offices but can't hire any Herald staff. It will launch in September.

Former INL people Rick Neville and former Sunday Star Times editor Sue Chetwin have been involved for some time in the project. Shayne Currie, formerly deputy editor of the SST, will apparently take up the same post at the new paper, and political editor Jonathan Milne and former SST sports editor Duncan Johnstone has also been hired, along with Ant Philips from TV Guide. The smart money's still on a tabloid. Announcement within the week, apparently.

These People Are Bad and Dangerous I: The Bush administration's War on Science continues apace. The US government has blocked American scientists from attending the International Aids Conference in Bangkok in what appears to be a payback for Aids activists' rejection of America's abstinence-first philosophy. The US Department of Health and Human Services is claiming cost is an obstacle, but the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association protested that in the case of at least one prominent scientist, cost was never an issue:

She pointed out that the trip would have been paid for by the American Medical Association, not the US government. "It is an incredible example of political pettiness. It is anti-intellectual and it is interfering with scientists and the scientific process and means American government-employed scientists are not allowed to be here to share their knowledge," she said.

These People Are Bad and Dangerous Part II: The Enron investigation has partially lifted the lid on what the Republicans did in Texas last year. It goes like this: Republican House majority whip Tom DeLay solicited contributions from Enron and other large corporates and then secretly and in breach of Texas state law channelled the money into Republican campaigns for the Texas legislature with the declared and specific aim of gaining a majority to redraw the state's congressional districts so as to engineer a Republican gerrymander and make it impossible for sitting Democrats to be re-elected. Even though four Democrat members of the Texas House went into hiding to try and prevent the gerrymander vote, it worked. The Washington Posts's detailed story also notes the legislative favours that Enron appears to have got for its money.

These People are Bad and Dangerous III: The Bush administration has been making threats and promises to push the Pakistani government into capturing and delivering Osama Bin Laden. So what? The order has come for delivery on specific dates - the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston at the end of this month. In order to smooth the way for a politically advantageous result, the administration has raised no protest against the Pakistani government's pardoning of nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan, who recently admitted exporting nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Most of the US media appear to have ignored the 'July Surprise' story broken last week in The New Republic.

Don Hills has had some interesting observations to make about the copy-controlled CDs being released into the local market by EMI and others. I've note previously that the "protection" part of this technology is haphazard and often ineffective. But, as Don points out, some of these CDs contain deliberately corrupted data that breaks the error correction in CD players - and hence means that your new CD may be ruined if it subsequently picks up even a small scratch. The complete thread from nz.comp is here.

And Tracey Nelson has analysed the All Blacks' performance against the Pacific Islanders on Saturday night. I thought it was a great game and that the PIs demonstrated again that they are a handful for any team in the world. But, as Tracey points out, "28 missed tackles and 18 handling errors." Hopefully concentration levels will be raised considerably for this Saturday's Tri-Nations opener against Australia.

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Respect | Jul 12, 2004 11:12

I never met T P McLean, but I long admired him for his ability to bring style and grace to sports journalism, for his vision of why sport ("the study of the human being under stress") was a worthy topic for literary exercise, and for the fact that the old man just kept on writing for most of his 90 years.

Sir Terence passed away on Saturday night, just after the All Blacks had beaten back a lively challenge in their first match against the new Pacific Islanders side, but before Daniel Vettori played the one-day game of his career in helping New Zealand thrash the West Indies in the final of the NatWest series.

But that wouldn't have bothered him too much: as D J Cameron points out this morning, T P never much cared for cricket. Anyway, cheers to the memory of a great New Zealand journalist.

US News & World Report has got its hands on the hitherto classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib. It reads like Lord of the Flies. Newsweek reaffirms the view that most of the poor bloody Iraqis in the midst of it all were common criminals rather than terrorist suspects.

Herald political correspondent John Armstrong, who has begun to look like his paper's National Party correspondent - his last six columns have been about National and its various initiatives - makes this observation this morning about the policy debate within the party.

The disagreement is but one example of a wider problem confronting National as it moves beyond easy sloganeering and starts developing firm, detailed policy that not only works, but remains politically saleable and fiscally affordable.

So far, National has exploited highly populist issues in a broad-brush fashion which would do Winston Peters proud.

But listen to Dr Brash try to explain where National would build the extra prisons needed to house all the extra inmates denied parole, and you hear the disturbing sound of policy being made on the hoof.

Or to put it another way, the party still has to move on from policy announcements as a form of marketing - albeit a successful one - to policies that actually have practical merit.

This process may already be underway in terms of Maori and Treaty policy. There was not so much of Orewa aired at the party's conference over the weekend. Instead, the Business Roundtable's Rob McLeod was invited to deliver a speech that appeared to call for affirmative action employment policies for Maori (they'll be race-based then?), capacity-building and, er, closing the gaps. For all the palaver over the poorly-designed Community Employment Grants scheme, it would be hard for any serious government to move beyond the philosophy behind it - and to avoid the occasional funding whoopsie itself.

The interesting thing is how far recourse to populism seems to be drawing National into promising to monitor the lives of many New Zealanders. Its law and order policy relegates the existing parole system in favour of an uncosted, loosely-defined plan to closely monitor released prisoners, that we are asked to take on faith.

This weekend, various ideas were floated at the party's conference: including using court orders and the threat of benefit withdrawal to force parents to take classes to improve their parenting skills, and to deal with their own problems with anger, violence and substance abuse. The plan might also involve "parenting contracts" reminiscent of the Code of Family and Social Responsibility, which never made law under Jenny Shipley's government. It shapes up like not so much the nanny state as the wait-till-your-father-gets-home state.

Katherine Rich also made a speech which advanced the possibility of compulsory work for the dole, citing the (decidedly mixed) results of a similar policy in Australia, but veering away from the key issues of cost, the opposition of Treasury, distortion of the labour market and the extremely underwhelming performance of the work-for-the-dole project under the last National government.

Then Don Brash this morning came up with a very ropey statistic: that there are now eight times more people drawing benefits than there were 30 years ago. There are, of course a million more New Zealanders now than there were then, and, of course, you have to ignore the fact that a universal family benefit (not counted) has since been replaced by a system of targeted benefits (counted); that thousands of people who had been in institutions now live in the community on benefits, and that there was so much featherbedding and makework in the system that unemployment barely existed in 1974. Between 1982 and 1996 - the most relevant statistic I can find - the percentage of gross income composed of benefits rose from 4% to 5%.

On a related tip, the Columbia Journalism Review has a very interesting piece looking at when political journalists stop being passive conduits for political party spin and start saying that false statements are actually false. I wonder if blog culture - where all sides tend to be more willing to call a lie a lie, and prove it thus - has started to have a telling impact on the mainstream.

And I've got my own thread on Indymedia Aotearoa at the moment, in which Aaron sees my qualms about Michael Moore as evidence of my co-option into the "acceptable left". I don't mind the commentary, which is perfectly polite, but the idea that my "rehabilitation into the mainstream has become apparent with a number of comments made by him in regard to Michael Moore," is kind of silly. Aaron dismisses Moore's editing liberties in Bowling for Columbine:

Brown also refers us to some gun nut in the US whose deconstruction of 'Bowling for Columbine' merely shows it's author up as someone who has no idea how documentaries get made. To explain; The gun nut has 'discovered' that Moore has deliberately spliced different parts of one of Charlton Heston's Gun speeches together 'to make him look worse'. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how documentaries get made will know that you don't break the narrative flow to stop and explain every edit in case it upsets someone. The only alternative to this 'deliberate splicing' is to replay the entire speech (which Moore has happily posted on his web site) and somehow I don't think he would have won an Oscar if he had 15 minutes of Charlton Heston raving about gun rights in the middle of his documentary.

Actually, Moore spliced together two Heston speeches to deliberately create a misleading impression. Among other things, he also used a cut of the infamous Willie Horton ad bearing a caption that never appeared on the original, altering it only for the DVD release of the film. Intriguingly, Spinsanity, which has pursued Moore for a while over this sort of thing, has a detailed post on a very similar use of film-editing innuendo by the Bush campaign machine. It just can't be right for one side and wrong for the other. I'm fascinated by Moore - who gives a good account of himself in an interview in the latest Entertainment Weekly - but I think it's only rational to have reservations about the way he works.

Anyway, I'd really rather not carry the burden of being some proxy for sundry left-wing beliefs to which I'm supposed to subscribe (but in some key respects, don't). Aaron seems to regard anyone with whom he disagrees as necessarily having been co-opted by the system. I'll wish him the best with the struggle - and forgive him for being just a tiny bit patronising.

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Good sport and so on | Jul 09, 2004 11:46

Oh good, more sport for the weekend. So call me a victim of the capitalist culture industry's deadening of civil dissent through mindless spectacle. You wouldn't be the first. Don't care. I'm allowed to be anaesthetised sometimes, aren't I?

Wimbledon was good, even if it all happened in the middle of the night and the TV listings for replay times proved to be as accurate as a CIA weapons analysis. If you've ever picked up a racquet, you can't not love Roger Federer. The man has shots. And Sharapova? Yeah, baby. The Black Caps are back into a rhythm, the Silver Ferns are clearly better than the only team they're at risk of being beaten by, and you have to be happy for the Greeks.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the All Blacks' match against the Pacific Islanders - and hoping that we see a return to the unity of purpose that marked their first test against England at Carisbrook - from the couch, in front of a roaring fire, rather than at that odd stadium in Albany. (Memo to the PR firm that was going to send me a bottle of some new whisky: any time today would be real good ...)

At the intersection of sport and politics, Dave McGregor points out an interesting post on This Modern World about the rebuffing by the ICC of an offer by the US to stage some of the matches in the next cricket World Cup.

The same site digs up a story that has gone astray in most of the Western media - children at Abu Ghraib, and, chillingly, their abuse there.

It seems the government has finally managed a robust response to National's law-and-order pitch - in the form of Phil Goff's interview with Linda Clark this morning. Why, when they had a heads-up on the Brash speech several weeks ago, it has taken them five days to offer a decent rebuttal - not a challenge, you would think, given the unravelling of the tough-on-crime philosophy in the US, the actual story in our own crime statistics, and the government's own initiatives in the past two years - I don't know. Spooked? Whatever.

The editorial responses to the Brash speech have been quicker off the mark. NBR, as you'd expect, was all luvvies over the speech (it "mirrors the war against terrorism, where effective strikes at the key offenders are the only realistic response" apparently) and pointed approvingly to a foam-flecked editorial from Hawke's Bay Today, and claimed the New Zealand Herald's editorial analysis contained only "mild criticism".

Eh? A sample of what's actually in the Herald editorial: "Dr Brash erred by going too far … international surveys suggest, in fact, that tough policies sponsor the worst reconviction rates …an approach based on punishment and deterrence does not fix the problem of reoffending …it is unarguable that release on parole lowers the likelihood of reoffending …Dr Brash was letting fervour override reason …the antediluvian nature of much of National's proposal …" C'mon, Nevil, I know you're under riding orders, but you oughtn't make things up. And where's my pen?

The Press's editorial writer, on the other hand, seemed to feel fully entitled to make things up: " … crime continues inexorably to rise after a decade or more of economic growth, widening prosperity and falling unemployment, all of which are supposed to be factors affecting the crime rate." No, it doesn't. Overall crime has "inexorably" fallen. Even violent crime, which last year was slightly higher on a per-capita basis than it was in 1996, has been lower in the interim. Theonly category of crime which can be said to have "inexorably" risen in the past decade in New Zealand is white-collar crime. Pardon me if I find this sort of thing a tad unprofessional.

No Right Turn has, on the other hand, sought useful recourse to some actual facts, with a look at an obscure but interesting study of crime trends in New Zealand, and public perceptions of crime as they relate to the treatment of crime in the media.

Garth George has a column on the punishment debate that's not quite what you might have expected. As I have noted before, even when he's on some other planet where the sky is a different colour, Darth can lash together an argument more ably than most newspaper opinion writers.

Dave Kopel has come up with the inevitable omnibus of "deceits" in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and, just as inevitably, it's been top o' the Blogdex lately. Although some of Kopel's "56 deceits" are frankly tenuous (the attempts to link Moore with terrorism, the free-pass for Bush on his dumping of Harken shares, the charitable view of Bush's conduct on the fateful morning of September 11) others are sound. It's worth reading.

The caveat, of course, is that Moore is far from alone in massaging the facts in pursuit of his argument. Somebody loaned me Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them this week, I've been reading it, and I think it can be safely asserted that the simply amazing falsehoods uttered by Moore's counterparts on the right make him look mild in comparison. As Kevin Drum put it recently in Washington Monthly:

So is Fahrenheit 9/11 unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments? Sure. But that just makes it the perfect complement to the arguments of many in the pro-war crowd itself. Perhaps the reason they're so mad is that they see more than a little of themselves in it.

Spinsanity had a look at the film too. Moore, meanwhile, has some rebuttal and a new blog of his own. He has also said it's okay if people want to download his movie from file-sharing networks.

Meanwhile, America's pointless and creepy crackdown on visa rules for foreign journalists has taken another step. A large company contacted me last week about a press trip to the US - I had to point out that the proposed date would not allow time to obtain the special journalist's visa now required, raising the possibility of my colleagues and I being detained and deported. Don't laugh. It keeps happening.

Interesting story in Wired on the market leader in "music identification", Gracenote.

Microsoft has been getting all viral about its new Philippe Starck-designed mouse. I think I prefer the toothbrushes.

The Financial Times looks at the problems the indictment of former Enron CEO Ken Lay might cause for his former (but not any more) good buddy George W. Bush. The Smoking Gun still has its archive of the extensive correspondence between the two men. And Robert Bryce on Salon.com looks at the chances of Lay deciding to just plain spill about it all.

A brilliant post in Slashdot as part of a discussion of news that the extended edition of Return of the King looks set to get a theatrical run in advance of its release on DVD. It points out the strategic shortcomings of Gandalf's plan:

Basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.

Righto. Have a nice weekend. If you're in Auckland at a loose end, SJD is only $10 at the King's Arms tonight. And if you are spiritually as opposed to geographically lost, allow me to enthusiastically direct you to Density Church, whose founder, Pastor Brian Tamariki, I interviewed in my Wire show on Wednesday. Truly, he is a beacon in dark times …

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Houston, we have a problem ... | Jul 07, 2004 09:37

I was with the kids at Incredible Science on Monday morning, thus missing Linda Clark's interview with National leader Don Brash about his party's new law and order pitch, but someone has kindly sent me a transcript. Wow. Interesting.

Brash comes across quite oddly in the interview; he remembers his message well enough - playing down costs, insisting there won't be any problem building new prisons once the Resource Management Act is amended to curb the public's right to object, speaking fondly of "welfare reform", invoking the familiar, dread names - and even declares, although it's the first he's heard of it, his willingness to de-ratify a UN convention to turn his "hard labour" blurt ("This is not a policy we've actually worked through at this stage") into reality. But off-script, his affinity with his topic seems almost non-existent ("I can't quote any international experience, Linda. This is not my particular territory …").

The key is that Clark is admirably briefed; well enough to talk Brash through what the 2002 Sentencing Act actually says, for example - you don't get that on the telly. I won't quote much of it here, but this bit is interesting:

Brash: But Linda, we have one of the worst crime records in the developed world.

Clark: Well, that's interesting. See, that's what you said in your speech yesterday. You said arguably we've got one of the highest crime rates in the developed world.

Brash: Absolutely.

Clark: Well, this morning we get out the seventh United Nations survey on crime trends - and we haven't. I'm looking at a comparison of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, England and Wales, South Africa and the USA. In homicide, rape and robbery, which I think we all agree are the three crimes which would by anyone's account be the kind of criminals you would imagine we'd want to be focusing on, we'd want to be locking up, New Zealand doesn't have the highest rate. Per 100,000 population New Zealand on homicides; 1.17, Australia is 1.57, Canada 1.59, England 1.61, South Africa 51.3, USA 4.5. We have the lowest homicide rate. Go to rape. New Zealand 22.4, Australia 81.4, Canada 78.08, England 16.23. They have a lower rate. South Africa is higher, USA is higher. We don't have the highest ...

Brash: Linda, I quoted ... My source for my statement in my speech ... I haven't got that source in front of me at the moment, but on the basis of that source which I gave in my speech, we have one of the highest crime rates in the developed world. I mean that's the basis on which I made the statement.

Clark: Well, your source was the United Kingdom Home Office statistical bulletin of the year 2000.

Brash: Okay. What's wrong with that?

Presenter: Well I'm just... Well, nothing I guess, but I'm just quoting you the UN survey on crime and it says completely the opposite.

Nice touch: knowing what Brash was quoting in his speech when he didn't. Later, he cites New York's experience as an example of circuit-breaking in addressing crime and Clark tells him that New York itself is now suffering a crime wave. "I was not aware of that frankly," he says.

Fair enough - I wasn't either. Indeed, according to the reported crime rates for 2003, New York City remains a success story - reported crime there actually fell last year, as part of trend put down to responsive policing more than get-tough sentencing. Even here, we have to be a little careful - there have been reports recently of police corruption and officers fudging the reporting of crime statistics to make results look better.

This Christian Science Monitor story from January looks at the 2003 numbers, notes a slight decline in overall crime nationally and extends credit to New York. But it also makes some alarming observations about some of prison-packing states.

Take Texas, the poster child for sentencing escalation and parole withdrawal, and subject of reports like this enthusiastic (but oddly selective, given that the only serious comparison made is with California) effort from the National Centre for Policy Analysis. Great stuff. Except that crime soared 50% in Dallas last year. In Arizona, the state with the highest incarceration rate in the western US, crime was up 65%.

The picture isn't always clear. In many smaller US cities, violent crime is rising, sometimes dramatically - and the causes seem to be manifold: from the fact that smaller centres have failed to adopt proactive policing methods employed in places like New York, to the belief that criminal elements have been shooed out of the big cities and taken root in the heartland, and even the unintended consequences of zero-tolerance policing itself.

Meanwhile, California is releasing early about 40,000 prisoners a month because nobody wants to pay the bill for its sentencing laws. Many of them are being released after having served as little as 10% of their sentences.

Most are non-violent - burglars, thieves and drunk drivers - but this in itself is a serious problem. There is better evidence that certainty of punishment, rather than severity of punishment, is a deterrent to crime. But it looks like the draconian terms, mandatory minimum sentences and gimmick laws introduced in the 1990s, have filled the prisons - and dangerously undermined certainty of punishment for minor offenders in California.

Texas had a similar capacity problem in 2001 - and simply tipped out thousands of inmates to ease overcrowding. Forty eight per cent of them re-offended. This year, Virginia is struggling to find the money to run its prison service; the legislature in Michigan is considering changing sentencing guidelines because eight of its 10 prisons are overcrowded; and Missouri is releasing non-violent felons with a retrospective law.

In Arizona, long mandatory minimum sentences, which give judges no choice in sentencing, have packed the jails with mostly non-violent offenders.

Many of them are victims of the profoundly unsuccessful war on drugs - as this story points out, a decade of garbage sentencing law, with a heavy focus on previous convictions, has created idiotic anomalies:

FAMM points out in its report that Arizona's sentencing laws also do not distinguish between addicts who sell a small amount of drugs to fund their habit and those who are drug "kingpins."

For example, a drug addict convicted of selling a gram of cocaine with a previous possession charge faces a minimum sentence of 4.5 years. A major drug dealer caught selling a kilo of cocaine faces a minimum sentence of three years.

And a 45-year-old crack addict caught three times with a small quantity of that drug got a 10-year sentence for his third offence - and never, at any point, any help with his problem. This, remember is also the state policy that procured a 65% increase in crime last year.

Also in this week's news, a 17-year-old reform to US federal sentencing guidelines - which allowed and even obliged judges to go beyond jury verdicts and evidence presented in court in considering sentences, and thus to impose sentences greater than the maximum for the offences found to have been committed - has been declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. The detailed sentencing guidelines have been the subject of complaints for a long time from federal judges, who believe they restrict judicial discretion. It looks like a truly hideous mess:

"The impact of Blakely is monumental. It will create a tidal wave of litigation and has enormous implications for the potential destruction of the federal sentencing guidelines," said Joel Weiss, a Garden City lawyer and former state prosecutor who does criminal defense work in federal court. "This is saying that the system is so broke that it can't be fixed and let's put it on the curb for garbage."

Interestingly, the court's majority decision was written by a very conservative judge, Justice Antonin Scalia. And it is a stunning new report from the American Bar Association, commissioned and endorsed by a mildly conservative member of that same bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy, that may permanently alter tough-on-crime rhetoric. It finds that the keynote tough-on-crime policies, such as mandatory minimum sentences and no-parole programmes, while politically popular, have proven costly and counterproductive.

Kennedy, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, said: "Society ought to ask itself how it's allocating its resources. The phrase 'tough on crime' should not be a substitute for moral reflection."

ABA president Dennis Archer has an op-ed on the report and its conclusions:

Let me be clear about one thing. These are not your typical criminal-coddling recommendations from out of touch advocacy groups. They are the product of hardheaded, realistic assessment of the problems in our criminal justice system. Put simply, our current approach to crime and punishment is not working: it locks up too many of the wrong people, has a disproportionate impact on minorities, and fails to make our communities safer because it poorly prepares prisoners to reenter society upon release. The need for reform is clear. We've spent more than 20 years getting tougher on crime. Now we need to get smarter.

We've done quite a lot of getting tough already in New Zealand. Between 1991 and 2000, the proportion of offences resulting in a custodial sentence, the length of sentences and the number of people in prison have all increased - radically, in some cases. Total crime fell last year, as it has every year since 1994, with the exception of 2002. White collar crime has risen about 40% in that time, but other dishonesty offences have fallen steadily. The performance in addressing sexual offences has to be counted a success on the figures, especially given the probability that such offences are far more likely to be reported than was once the case - whether that can best be put down to changes in sentencing law is open to question. Violent crime (10.3% of overall offences) has risen slightly lately after a dip and last year stood at 115 per 10,000 people, compared to 105 in 1996. Call it the P Blip. (I wouldn't call it a "crime wave" like Don Brash did. Fifty per cent year-on-year: now that's a crime wave. No Right Turn has a more detailed look at the actual numbers which is well worth reading.)

Sentencing law must adapt to society like any other, and of course there are instances where it is appropriate to increase sentences and curb parole. But I think there is a point of, at best, diminishing returns.

It appears that the custodians of the law in America have begun to cry "enough". It also appears that we would be pretty foolish to embrace that from which they are recoiling.

PS: Someone asked after studies showing a neutral or negative correlation between longer sentences and re-offending. I suspect you can find reports for all seasons on this - I wouldn't know who's actually right - but try this one from the alarmingly-named Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada ("The 50 studies involved over 300,000 offenders. None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism. The recidivism rate for offenders who were imprisoned as opposed to given a community sanction were similar. In addition, longer prison sentences were not associated with reduced recidivism. In fact, the opposite was found. Longer sentences were associated with a 3% increase in recidivism."), this charming little number from Germany about how defendants dealt with by judges and social workers deemed "liberal" were markedly less likely to re-offend, and a bunch of stuff in here, including a finding that probation was more effective for the repeat offenders to whom it is most often denied than it was for first time offenders!

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Gossip, rumour and fact | Jul 06, 2004 10:50

Whatever the merits of Canwest's New Zealand IPO, it might not be wise to count its acquisition of MTV programming for C4 among them: not when MTV itself may be with us as soon as September.

In the Herald last week, Brian Gaynor noted that "CanWest has also signed an agreement with MTV to bring its programming to C4" towards the end of a fairly positive assessment of Canwest's offering, which has been popular enough to see allocations to investors cut back.

But those programmes will look a little dated if, as I have heard, MTV Asia really is in discussions with Sky to add both the MTV and VH1 channels to the Sky bouquet. On the other hand, it would stand to hurt C4 far less than it would Sky's existing and somewhat unlovely music offering, Juice TV.

Gaynor's identification of Canwest New Zealand CEO Brent Impey as a strong plus in perceptions of the company id doubtless correct, but the question everyone will be asking is how long the advertising boom that makes Canwest's radio stations so bountiful will last. Opinions on ShareTrader appear to be more pessimistic than those in the mainstream media.

That boom is, of course, seeing the improvement and expansion of media real estate all over the shop: the most recent example of which is the all-new (and somewhat excitably designed) Weekend Herald, which appears to have more substance than its similarly made-over weekend rival, the Sunday Star Times.

But wait! There's more! Probably. The Herald's owner, APN, has done quite a good job of smothering rumours about its plans for a new Sunday title. Word is, it will be produced (and indeed, is being planned) from the Herald's Auckland office, but it won't be the Sunday Herald, but a new APN title. But why would the APN compete with its existing weekend flagship? Well, who said it would compete? And who said it would be a broadsheet?

The topic was doubtless under discussion at last night's enjoyable 65th anniversary do for The Listener at the Auckland War Memorial Museum: "Look," said a journalist of my acquaintance, "at Gavin Ellis and Tim Murphy hovering around Rick Neville and that Horton chap trying to find out what they're doing …"

It's been a busy few days. Paul Atkins, the gentlemanly director of the British Council in New Zealand, invited me to lunch yesterday to meet his replacement, Paula Middleton, a New Zealander long absent from these shores, who comes here after a two-year secondment with the World Bank. I discovered when I explained my various roles to her that she had once had some involvement with Auckland University's Radio Bosom, the messy predecessor of 95bFM. So there you are: another bFM deep-cover alumnus …

Last week, of course, was occasion for a brief visit to winter-festival Queenstown, where I can report that huge marketing budgets are being sluiced around like happy fire hoses for the benefit of a celebrated few. Last week there was the 42 Below party, for which hospitality types were flown in from all over (Radar: "There was more vodka than a Russian supermarket - and I've been to a Russian supermarket."), and a British American Tobacco do, where girls in shiny little red dresses wandered around handing out Dunhills and being groped by a certain TV host. We stepped out for a drink with a couple of celebrity types, but I'll resist the temptation to go all Bridget Saunders.

On a more serious tip, I don't really want to dignify National's Sunday pitch for the string-'em-up vote with a fully worked-up essay, but a few bullet points are in order:

- Whatever your criticisms of the parole system, it's fatuous to describe it as "a failed experiment" when the re-offending rate of inmates who are granted parole is half that of those who don't.

- Even if, as Don Brash promised, parole was scrapped for 85% of offenders, the buggers would still eventually get out anyway - but the system would lose its ability to monitor and restrict their re-entry to society. You'd have to be feeling lucky to regard that as an improvement.

- If, as Brash suggests, National would weaken the Resource Management Act so it could force through the construction of half a dozen new prisons to cope with between and 50% and 100% rise in the national prison muster, it would be buying a fight on something approaching the scale of that looming over its Treaty promises. National is promising things it can't deliver in government - at least without being consumed by the effort. (You might also note the somewhat ironic fact that National MPs have actively opposed every new prison planned by the current government.)

- There is so much wrong with Don Brash's vague plan for a return to hard labour in prisons (scrapped as unworkable back in the 1950s), which was mooted in a response to a question from someone at the Sensible Sentencing Trust as to whether he supported flogging. New Zealand would have to exempt itself from a UN convention. How could the government guarantee public security if it was to send violent criminals out on road gangs? At what cost? How many non-criminals will be denied such labouring jobs so that inmates can be accommodated? The Dom Post has a story outlining some other problems this morning.

- Jeanette Fitzsimons' depiction of National's plans as an Americanisation of our system is well founded. The oft-repeated claim that our incarceration rate is second only to (but far behind) that of the US, doesn't seem to be true (Russia, for example, still had 644 prisoners per 100,000 people in jails in 2001, not far short of the US figure of nearly 700), but are we to follow it down the road that now sees one in seven of all black males incarcerated at any given time - and three quarters of black male high school dropouts either locked up or on probation or parole? Especially when it doesn't work? (View the like-for-like comparisons of crime rates here and in the US if you doubt me.) The ultimate indictment of this philosophy came three years ago as the reality of politically-driven corrective policies and mandatory sentencing gimmicks began to bite:

The three states with the highest rates of incarceration - Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi - in the past two years have tried to limit the growth of their prison populations, according to The Sentencing Project. Louisiana eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes, Mississippi eased its "truth in sentencing" law and Texas increased the number of inmates paroled by nearly a third in 2001 over the previous fiscal year.

National's proposed policy is, in practical terms, bullshit. In political terms, it might win a few votes.

I do think that Tai Hobson, whose wife Mary was killed in the RSA murders, is well within his rights to take a civil action against the government over the handling of the murderer William Bell's parole conditions. The Mangere probation office failed disastrously to apply the safeguards in the system, and even though the parole and sentencing laws and structure of the parole board have considerably been overhauled since, that needs to be accounted for.

Anyway, another week, another slightly dotty Sunday Star Times editorial, this one on home detention:

Home detention, a scheme under which some offenders can serve "prison" sentences in the comfort of their own homes, is costing us more and more. As we reveal today, the number of home-based convicts on the dole has more than doubled in the past two years, at a cost of $10 million a year to the taxpayer.

On the other hand, as the Sunday Star Times also reveals, this is still far cheaper than housing inmates in a minimum security prison: $23,000 a head compared to $58,000. So in granting home detention to 485 offenders and paying them either the dole or a sickness benefit we're still saving a net $17 million annually. The idea of forcing them into some sort of work (other than the community service many are already doing) suffers the same problems as any other kind of makework idea: sharply increased costs and distortion of the private labour market.

It's actually hard to divine the point of the editorial, but its rather misleading statement that "There is revulsion that rapists and other violent sex offenders can be eligible" for home detention needs addressing. They can, but not, as a casual reader might think, in the same sense as minor offenders.

To apply for home detention an offender must have been convicted of an offence punishable by a prison term of two years or less. Serious offenders, on the other hand, can apply to serve the last five months of their prison terms under home detention - it's effectively a more secure version of parole, rather than the "get out of jail free" card the SST seems to think it is. It was even supported by the Police Association.

This might also be a good time to remind ourselves that when National introduced home detention in March 1999, the legislation was supported by every party in Parliament.

PS: I trust everyone has read our reprint of the late Andrew Heal's Metro essay on political correctness. I plan to fish out and publish more worthwhile archive stuff from now on. And if you're waiting for a reply from me to your email, hang in there. It's school holidays, but I'm getting there …

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