By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

innocent victim against the evil attacker (see Chapter One), it was why theCorrections Department put a young man in a van with a dangerous and violentprisoner. One article in The Press, for example, reported: ‘[R]egardless of anyuncertainty over the rules, it defies belief that anyone could have thought itappropriate to place a 17­year­old remand prisoner in the same compartment as twoadults, one of whom was classified as a dangerous criminal’ ("Protecting prisoners,"2006: Par. 6). In these respects, the case shifted press interest away from reformingprison and reducing the prison population, to the way in which the government, andits penal bureaucracy, was unable to protect the innocent from predatory strangers.Instead of letting prisoners out, it provoked demands for a United States style ‘ThreeStrikes’ law, which the Sensible Sentencing Trust argued would have saved Ashleyfrom his attacker. This can be seen in the following claim made by McVicar:If New Zealand had a “Three Strikes” law Liam Ashley and manyother victims would still be alive today [and] it is Parliament andweak spineless politicians that have Liam Ashley’s blood on theirhands.(McVicar, 2006c: Par. 1)This point was pushed further by David Garrett, then legal advisor for the SensibleSentencing Trust, who in 2008 became a member of the political party Act NewZealand. He stated in a column in the New Zealand Herald:The “fix” … is simple and obvious: a New Zealand “three strikes”system, in which a “strike” is defined not as a felony, but an offenceof violence carrying a sentence of two or more years in prison. If wehad a system like that, Liam Ashley and countless other victimswould be alive today.(Garrett, 2006: Par. 15­16)The crystallisation of the scandal by the media once again legitimised publicdemands for harsher sentencing practices, putting immense pressure on thegovernment to respond to them, rather than being able to pursue its own EffectiveInterventions strategies.90