By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

policymaking 32 . From 2000 to 2006, ‘punishment’ was mentioned in 124parliamentary debates on criminal justice while reintegration was mentioned in 64 33 .The majority of the arguments mentioning punishment had a punitive overtone, inwhich politicians reflected on the Labour­led government’s lack of punishment as away of illustrating its failings (an exact number could not be taken here as somedebates had arguments for and against punishment). This can be seen in thefollowing comment made by United Future member Marc Alexander:We have a range of criminals in this country who, seemingly at will,can walk away from their punishments. We witnessed just recentlythe case of a sex offender, the paedophile in Blackball [sic], whowent there without his parole conditions allowing him to do so. Whathappened to him? Nothing! … He just simply walked away, with nopunishment. And we see again that same attitude demonstrated rightthroughout the criminal justice system—a lacksadasical attitudetowards the enforcement of punishment.(New Zealand Parliament, 2005a: Par. 71)Articles that had this punitive overtone demonstrate that the enforcement ofpunishment was considered the number one priority of criminal justice.There were a few individuals, however, that spoke out against this urge to punish.One of these was David Riley, the Director of Psychological Services for theDepartment of Corrections when he stated that ‘[t]here are now more than 23,000studies showing that punishment is one of the least effective ways of influencinghuman behaviour’ (quoted in Nippert, 2005: Par. 10). However, this seemed to gounnoticed by the majority of politicians, where only a small number of those thatmentioned ‘punishment’ criticised the emphasis placed on punishment andincapacitation. Green Party member Nandor Tanczos made one such judgement:32A search was conducted of ‘rehabilitation’ but the analysis became too problematic as there aremultiple ways in which the term can be used. This resulted in thousands of articles being retrieved,many of which were not significant to the present argument. Instead, it was decided to search forarticles pertaining to the use of reintegration, as politicians, when discussing the rehabilitation ofoffenders, frequently noted the reintegration of offenders also.33In addition, there were 24 articles on reintegration, all of which involved an identical writtenquestion to the Minister of Corrections concerning 24 different offenders (see, for example, NewZealand Parliament, 2001c). Each article gave an identical answer, and for this reason all of thesearticles have been combined together as one debate.75