By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

‘innovative’ (Collins, 2009b: Par. 1) way of approaching prison expansion, although,the private sector will have a vested interest in maintaining high levels ofimprisonment. Such high rates can be expected, given that the prison population inMay 2009 was 195 per 100,000 (8,300 prisoners) (Broun, 2009), up from 185 per100,000 of population in 2008 (International Centre for Prison Studies, 2008), thusproving that the slight decline from 2007/2008 was a ‘false down’ and the Nationalgovernment has renewed its commitment to penal populism. Added to privatisationare proposals for double bunking. This is seen as a cost­cutting solution toNew Zealand’s burgeoning prison population, adding 1,000 beds to New Zealand’sprisons (despite the effects this has both on prison staff and on prisoners) (Collins,2009a). The government has also announced that Mount Crawford prison will bereopened in July 2009 to deal with rising numbers, after it was closed in June 2008when prison numbers were in decline (Williamson, 2009). These strategies illustratethe acceptance of high prison numbers in New Zealand and are suggestive of the newdirection penal policy will take in future years.It has become clear that for those wanting to resist penal populism, one of thestrongest forces is the punitive discourse that has become so engrained in both publicand political debate on penal policy. This has been exacerbated by groups such as theSensible Sentencing Trust who use this type of rhetoric to gain public and politicalsupport. The media’s continual reliance on simplified crime reporting, which offersno in­depth analysis of crime and justice, has meant that the public continue to bepresented with a distorted view of reality. As a result, punitive policies put forwardby the Trust and politicians are increasingly seen as attractive to the public whoseanxieties surrounding crime remain high. Moreover, any efforts to oppose penalpopulism, such as the previous government’s Effective Interventions strategies,come across as being ‘soft’, as they are positioned against the punitive discourse thathas become so familiar in penal policy debates. Potentially, then, strategies opposingpenal populism need the strength to counter the punitive tide that has once againbeen created; otherwise, any opposing strategies of penal populism will beundermined, as was previously the case with the Labour government and itsEffective Intervention initiatives.102