By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Hawkins, & Kamin, 2001: 174). To the Sensible Sentencing Trust, taking poweraway from judges was regarded as a valuable way of ‘increasing punishment for thetruly serious offenders’ (Zimring, et al., 2001: 174), as establishment elites, and theirperceived leniency, were considered responsible for the rise in violent crime inNew Zealand (McVicar, 2004).(b) The use of the victimThe Sensible Sentencing Trust also use personalised victim accounts of crime andhuman suffering to gain popular and political support. For instance, it lobbied in2001 to make changes to legislation regarding DNA, with the mother of a murderedteenager speaking before the Justice and Electoral Select Committee (Chamberlain,2006). McVicar has noted the emotional pull crime victims have on MPs, stating thatin this instance ‘politicians had to look into the eyes of a mother who’d lost her sixyear­old’(Chamberlain, 2006: 77). As a result, the Criminal Investigations (BloodSamples) Act 1995 was changed in 2002 to include bodily samples 28 . Rather thandrawing on evidence­based research and analysis, the Sensible Sentencing Trustdeliberately used personal accounts of human suffering as evidence that legislativechanges were needed. Using accounts such as these is a way for the Trust to illustratethat ‘ordinary’ citizens were suffering due to the government’s lack of policy action.The use of victims to evoke sympathy is a technique used worldwide byorganisations hoping to gain public awareness and support (see Human RightsWatch, 2008; World Vision, 2009). Fattah (1992a: 4) notes the reasoning behindthis:28This was amended to widen the scope of DNA testing ‘as a crime­fighting investigative tool’ andincluded not only those convicted, but also those under suspicion (New Zealand Parliament, 2003:Par. 8).56