By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

[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 Zealand Parliament, 2002a: Par. 2)For the Opposition, however, the legislation demonstrated a further sign ofgovernment weakness. Because of the United Nations Convention against Tortureand Cruel, Inhumane, Treatment or Punishment, 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 Zealand’s sovereignty, with Georgina TeHeuheu claiming the following: ‘What is annoying is that [the Prisoners’ andVictims’ Claims Act] is typical, liberal, namby­pamby, Labour­type legislation …The government is obviously soft on law and order’ (New Zealand 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 and stable manner.To demonstrate the increasingly punitive nature of penal discourse of this period, asearch was conducted of New Zealand parliamentary debates for the words‘punishment’ and ‘reintegration’ 31 . The timeframe used was from 1 January 2000through to 31 December 2006 and was chosen to illustrate the tumultuous period thattook place in New Zealand after the 1999 referendum through to the end of 2006,when law and order seemed to take control. ‘Punishment’ and ‘reintegration’ werechosen as they represent two distinct and contrasting strategies of New Zealand31Unfortunately the New Zealand Parliamentary website only retrieved data back to 11 Feb 2003.Consequently, two additional searches were conducted on ‘punishment’ and ‘reintegration’ using theLegislation New Zealand database. The remaining data was filtered and 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 Zealand Parliamentary website.74