By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

of the total population (New Zealand official yearbook, 1954) 10 . Interestingly, thishigh rate of Māori imprisonment was bypassed in the report. What was ofimportance to the government, however, was the high rate of imprisonment overall,with the Minister of Justice noting that ‘in relation to population, we have 50 percent more people in our prisons daily than they have in England and Wales’(Department of Justice, 1954: 3). The report attempted to reduce the prisonpopulation by ‘divert[ing] men from a life of crime’ (Department of Justice, 1954:6). At the same time, the report placed strong emphasis on the training andrehabilitation of prisoners noting that as a main objective ‘[p]risoners … should notonly be detained, they should be trained’ (Department of Justice, 1954: 17). Whenoffenders did not respond to treatment, they continued to be dealt to without recourseto the penal extremes of later years. The Department of Justice (1954: 6) notes, forexample, that[t]here is no safety in undue severity. There is no room foremotionalism. The reformable must be trained for citizenship; thedeliberate and persistent offender must be removed from thecommunity for a long period of time.Therefore, in the post­war period, those citizens whose difficulties had led them tocrime, but who were responding to treatment, were dealt with leniently, while thosewho were not responding to treatment were detained indefinitely. The emphasis inboth scenarios was the consistent treatment of the offender.The need to reduce the prison population was emphasised in ensuing annual reportsfrom the Department of Justice (see Department of Justice, 1957, 1965).Nonetheless, prison musters continued to rise. By 1957 the male inmate population(including borstals and excluding minor prisons and police gaols) had increased bytwenty percent over a twelve month period, from 1,083 men to 1,302 men(Department of Justice, 1957). The Minister of Justice stated in the 1957 AnnualReport of the Department of Justice that the figures were ‘disturbing’ concluding:10Later publications of the New Zealand Official Yearbook and the Annual Reports from theDepartment of justice show sentenced and remand prisoners rather than convictions; the data is thusnot strictly comparable with present data.26