By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

McVicar paints of himself as the ‘ordinary’ citizen who does not get heard. Instead,the views of the Trust are being used increasingly for ‘expert’ advice on criminaljustice issues. In contrast, criminal justice professionals and elites who are highlyknowledgeable in this area are overlooked as they do not offer the populist attitudesthe media are seeking for a personal and ‘newsworthy’ story.When examining articles from the Dominion Post and the New Zealand Herald(which had mentioned the Sensible Sentencing Trust) from 2004 one can see a shiftin penal power away from expert opinion and analysis towards victims and theirrepresentatives. The politicisation of crime control had drawn the public into penalpolicy development and, in turn, gave the Sensible Sentencing Trust the authority itneeded to become the new expert in criminal justice matters. The press commonlyaccept and represent the Trust as the new expert, providing not only the Trust’sopinion on the issue at hand, but on how the process should be done in the future.For example, McVicar is interviewed in a New Zealand Herald article concerningparole. He notes that ‘[t]he safety of the community seems to be irrelevant and [thecriminal justice system are] just recycling … offenders on a regular basis (Devereux,2004: Par. 19). Here, McVicar disagrees with the decisions made by policy makers.He then goes on to give his advice on what he believes should be happening, notingthat New Zealand needs legislation that gives those in power the ability to holdrepeat offenders in prison indefinitely when necessary (Devereux, 2004), ignoring(or perhaps being unaware of) the fact that such powers already exist underNew Zealand’s preventive detention law and are used with increasing regularity 25 .McVicar, though, chose to bypass this fact, as it did not fit in line with his ownagenda. And, as usual, he was completely unchallenged by the journalist concerned.Of particular significance to the present argument is the way in which the SensibleSentencing Trust advocates for the harsh sentencing of offenders – a strategy notundertaken by other victim support groups. With this in mind, it seemed necessary to25Preventive detention is an indeterminate sentence which allows for the control of ‘dangerous’offenders (Hall & O'Driscoll, 2002). Offenders who receive this sentence are not given a sentence enddate as they are considered a threat to society. Instead, the offender is monitored in and out of prisonfor the rest of their lives by the Parole Board and is only released into the community when the ParoleBoard is satisfied that they no longer pose a threat to society. Upon their release they are liable to berecalled to prison at any time (Hurd, 2008). In 1985 in New Zealand there were 10 prisoners servingpreventive detention (New Zealand official yearbook, 1990), in 2003 there were 33 defendantssentenced to preventive detention for that year alone (Ministry of Justice, 2008) and by January 2009there were 215 prisoners serving preventive detention (Koubaridis, 2009).51