By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment
By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment
By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment
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[M]ost people, including myself, have a deep sense of wrong thatserious offenders can be awarded compensation for wrongfultreatment without those offenders themselves being required to paycompensation to their victims for the serious wrongs inflicted onthem.(New Zeal<strong>and</strong> Parliament, 2002a: Par. 2)For the Opposition, however, the legislation demonstrated a further sign ofgovernment weakness. Because of the United Nations Convention against Torture<strong>and</strong> Cruel, Inhumane, Treatment or <strong>Punishment</strong>, the government was compelled togive the prisoners compensation, even if it was to be taken off them. This then raisedthe issue for the Opposition of New Zeal<strong>and</strong>’s sovereignty, with Georgina TeHeuheu claiming the following: ‘What is annoying is that [the Prisoners’ <strong>and</strong>Victims’ Claims Act] is typical, liberal, nambypamby, Labourtype legislation …The government is obviously soft on law <strong>and</strong> order’ (New Zeal<strong>and</strong> Parliament,2005c: Par. 2, emphasis added). In a similar display of rhetoric, the SensibleSentencing Trust stated that it was the ‘[g]overnment’s pathetic attempt to pacify thepublic outrage at compensation being awarded to prisoners for some factious abuseof their “human rights”’ (McVicar, 2005a: Par. 2). Even though the government hadattempted to defuse the situation by introducing legislation that was thought to offervictims more protection, it only seemed to draw the punitive enclosure tighter wherethere was little freedom to act in an informed <strong>and</strong> stable manner.To demonstrate the increasingly punitive nature of penal discourse of this period, asearch was conducted of New Zeal<strong>and</strong> parliamentary debates for the words‘punishment’ <strong>and</strong> ‘reintegration’ 31 . The timeframe used was from 1 January 2000through to 31 December 2006 <strong>and</strong> was chosen to illustrate the tumultuous period thattook place in New Zeal<strong>and</strong> after the 1999 referendum through to the end of 2006,when law <strong>and</strong> order seemed to take control. ‘<strong>Punishment</strong>’ <strong>and</strong> ‘reintegration’ werechosen as they represent two distinct <strong>and</strong> contrasting strategies of New Zeal<strong>and</strong>31Unfortunately the New Zeal<strong>and</strong> Parliamentary website only retrieved data back to 11 Feb 2003.Consequently, two additional searches were conducted on ‘punishment’ <strong>and</strong> ‘reintegration’ using theLegislation New Zeal<strong>and</strong> database. The remaining data was filtered <strong>and</strong> those articles that were notregarding criminal justice were removed. Furthermore, because the database brings up debatesindividually, those that addressed the same question were grouped together to make it consistent withthe search of Hansard debates on the New Zeal<strong>and</strong> Parliamentary website.74