Does anyone know scientifically if these anger management courses work? Have they been rigorously assessed, or are they as spurious as the grief and trauma counselling in which modern ‘victims’ are made to wallow?

No radio talkbacker or editorial letter writer should rant on prisons or parole before reading Newbold’s new text,  the second of two recent books that should be compulsory for them.

 Last year David Fraser’s “A Land fit for Criminals – An insider’s view of crime, punishment and justice in the UK” exposed and excoriated the humbug of 30 years of UK official deceit on criminal justice. Now Newbold lets the NZ facts speak for themselves – the epitaphs from “a graveyard of abandoned fads”. 

MPs should be ashamed to posture in Parliament on penal policy without reading it. Earnest lobbyists for more rehabilitation spending should first show their bookshop receipt. Priests should have to recite key passages before pontificating on restorative justice, or on prison conditions. 

Why is a plain language description of 120 years of penal practice and policy so vital?

Because Newbold lucidly shows the truth of the saying ‘those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it’.

The book gives that sobering historical context.  One and a half centuries of hopes dashed, of sincere good will betrayed by the intractability of evildoers, should be humbling. That humility could transform a debate usually hijacked by high flown rhetoric, by cloud level intentions. Little in the corrections area has not been tried before, often many times.

Our supposedly more inhumane forebears seem to have done much better than us. If we judge on rehabilitation success today’s 86% reconviction rate proves that modern “prisons do not work”. That is nearly twice the rate of 50 years ago. Judging on the proper measure – the crime rate, our comparative failure is even more humiliating. On measures of decency we also fail. At the height of the prison farm and tree planting era most prisoners were doing useful work. Today the amount of “useful” work is negligible. Parole to work has all but vanished. Prison murders were unknown until recently. Drug addictions contracted in prison would have dumbfounded the Superintendents and warders of two generations ago (ignoring tobacco).

Official dogma still sees the criminal justice mission as therapy for sick souls. Newbold’s history shows both how enticing that goal has been for centuries, and how elusive. He records the failure of last decade’s fad – Integrated Offender Management with its “curative” courses. There’s no reason to think that this decade’s sacred cow – Tikanga Maori, will prove any better.

 Newbold offers no magic solutions. There are no crushing insights, no breakthroughs in psychology, and no statistical proofs of the superiority of his vision for prisons. If he has a vision it is well disguised.  He allows himself some modest pride in the achievements of Christchurch’s Salisbury St Foundation’s ‘habilitation’ centre or halfway house, and his role in the merited trashing of the 1989 Roper Committee of Inquiry’s loopy recommendations. But in this book his opinions are secondary.

While the progressives, the reformers, are of more interest to Newbold, he acknowledges the successes of the administrators he considers uninspired. Long boring periods under dour disciplinarian management, without riots, escapes and suicides, are a benchmark of success. 

Relative objectivity does not produce a passionless dry text. It is attractive, with many photographs and stuffed with stories.

Nor has academia suppressed the author’s normal human curiosity about the extreme and the bizarre. A whole chapter on the death penalty accepts our ghoulish interest in the detail, letting us know how prisoners and warders and even the hangman felt about execution.  Whipping and flogging are covered.

The book is astonishingly up to date, even predicting that Graeme Burton’s parole murder this year will influence current law changes.

There are faults. Organisation by topic rather than chronology leads to repetition. On the other hand, making each chapter self sufficient will help users who dip in for a topic.

Newbold does not forget his publisher’s need for sales. Professional jealousy will be the explanation if the book is not prescribed for criminology students across the land. It is extensively footnoted with a bibliography for every chapter.  ‘Key fact’ summaries should help the dawn cram before the exam.

I expect nevertheless little enthusiasm from some of Newbold’s academic competitors. Facts are irrelevant to their religion. Nothing can humble intellectuals who believe they’re anointed to show the moral inferiority of ordinary peoples’ intuitions. The message is unwelcome – that deterrence and retribution and protection are more important and achievable punishment aims than rehabilitation.

[Published in the DomPost around 30 April 2007]

Where are the politicians who should be staunchly defending Solid Energy? The ones so quick to call for measures to break up the gangs.

Any group of people who espouse lawbreaking should expect to be infiltrated. Crime gangs should as a matter of routine. Anti abortion extremists, corrupt political parties, islamofascist religious agitators, Wild Greens,  companies which dump toxic waste, paua poaching networks, child porn networks, etc etc should all work in constant fear of undercover operators blowing the whistle.

Solid Energy has to do it only because the Police are not. They should be but they’d rather prosecute road accident cases than chase people who deliberately cause harm. 

National, NZ First and ACT should have instantly defended Solid Energy.  They should be calling for reform of the law of entrapment, and the Privacy Act, so that deliberate wrongdoers know that they are not in a game – the community is deadly serious about lawbreaking.

The people dogging Solid Energy are trying to subvert democracy. Like all terrorists they know that the democratic majority will not vote for their wishes, but it might be cowed. So they set out with coercion to subvert the outcome of elections and lawful decision-making processes.  The state should be especially determined to show that it will not work. Instead Solid Energy has been left to struggle with these bullies on its own.

Solid Energy’s losses to the spurious “rare” snail campaign have already cost New Zealanders $25m, a sum that would have paid all the costs of a possum eradication programme for the entire West Coast for years.  But that sum is trivial compared to the main cost.

The success of the groups who’ve dogged Timberlands and Solid Energy sends a powerful message – that unlawful threats and sabotage and occupations work better than persuading your fellow citizens at the ballot box.

A bizarre call, but what the coach actually said should not be faulted.

“You want these players to want to be All Blacks and to want to stay in the country but it’s tempered by the fact they are offered a lot of money and it’s hard for young men to see beyond that at times.

“It’s a major issue that we need to address as a country. It’s not just the Rugby Union who can come up with the answers – the whole country, including the Government, needs to be part of the solution.”

We’ve all noticed the exodus of doctors and radiologists. In the law we can see our top young people being slower and slower to return from OE, if they come back at all. 100 skilled emigrants a day has long told us us that Sri Lanka status approaches.

We’re getting our reward for repeated choices of “lifestyle” over “business”. Like Sri Lanka we can be an impoverished backwater  investing desperately in ‘education’ only to see our world class graduates go off to look after the world, everywhere but here. We may avoid their type of  race war but crime and class and generational recrimination will accompany economic decline.

When the world-beating All Blacks cry for government help surely the penny must drop for the voters.  It matters when we can not compete financially.

There’s a cost for electing people who despise business or know nothing about it. There’s a price for every vote to add a cost, to waste an economic opportunity, to support a drone instead of a worker, to subject yet another productive person to the endless dispute and consultation and compliance procedures that make it so much easier not to be an employer.

“When did you last have it?” was my mother’s first question when she found me wandering in useless circles looking for something lost. The question was infuriating. “If I knew that it wouldn’t be lost” I’d snap. Then, irritatingly, her patient questions would lead me to the “of course” moment of insight.

It is well overdue for the arrogant 1960’s generation in power to ask that question about things we have lost. Things our forebears took as a matter of course. Big things like negligible vandalism, low crime and low prison recidivism.  And smaller things with at least as much impact on the quality of life, the civilizing habits of public dignity and courtesy that justified routine trust in strangers, and willingness to help each other.

My mother would have thought it a no-brainer to look back and ask when we last had low levels of youth drunkenness. What were the conditions before it became normal on our late evening streets to meet staggering sometimes vomiting gaggles of wasted girls dressed like sluts? What changed to make it everyday rather than exceptional to hear sporadic volleys of oaths and roars from shambling clusters of drunk boys? Exactly when did we accept that, though unmanly, discretion lay in avoiding the slurred eyes of brutish oafs shambling down the street, in case our glance was the challenge they were looking for?

I’d start looking at the era when the focus of enforcement shifted from the people behaving badly, to everyone but them.

When I was a teenager, we knew we were responsible for our own actions. If we were in the pub underage, or caught drinking or drunk in public, the consequence was clear. We were charged. We were penalized. We were named, and our families dealt as best they could with our shame. The courts and justice then were genuinely open – not the secret conclaves of the legal insiders they have become.

When the community said that it did not want underage drinking, or public drunkenness, it did the straightforward thing. It penalised those who were drinking underage, or publicly drunk.

Today’s law and enforcement in contrast is obsessed with secondary agents – those who sell liquor (or cigarettes or drugs or cleaning fluids or glue, or porn etc etc). The bar manager is responsible for drunkenness, not the drinkers. Advertisers are to blame, not those who choose to break the law. The “community” or schools, are scapegoats – for failing to interest bored brats.

There is desperation to shift accountability to others, from anyone with the choice or even direct influence on the behaviour. Only two classes have complete exemption. The parents – and  those who’ve taken from parents their powers to discipline their seriously defiant teenagers.

It is not hard to go back to where we were when we lost it – simply routinely charge kids for breaking laws against underage drinking and public drunkenness. Penalise the parents who have not tried to stop it. Then have penalties that mean something, not the family group conference charade.

Stop giving everyone the excuse that someone else is to blame.

“We” are not to blame for kids over whom we’ve been deprived of all control and nor is the school or the supermarket or service station, or the bouncer who failed to eject them or the barmaid who sold that last drink. “We” don’t need more “conversations” or community responsibility taking.

We need a simple reversion to law that respects and enforces personal responsibility.

Sometimes the inexplicable looks cunning in hindsight. Even if John Key’s extraordinary capitulation to Clark on the smacking prohibition was impetuous, to historians it could look like a very deep plan.

National need to help create their coalition partners. By sending decent Christian parents to despair they have perhaps given Gordon Copeland the best possible chance of crossing the 5% minimum party vote threshhold at the next election. Ecclesiastical politics have never been welcome in New Zealand, but if it was deliberate this  is cool execution of a stunning strategy. 

Lets hope John Key’s famous luck makes it pay off better than the last time the National Party gifted a seat to a prospective ally – Peter Dunne’s Ohariu Belmont.

If understanding is forgiveness our soldiers and sailors now have more chance of regaining the access to joint training and intelligence we lost 20 years ago when David Lange reneged on, then repudiated, ANZUS.

The new U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South & Southeast Asia (including Australasia) knows us as well as any senior US official could. He was one of us. He is a former New Zealand diplomat.

This latest appointment is another sharp turn in a career of hairpin bends, but seemingly few blind alleys.

Professor James Clad became a US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense on 29 April. His mother was a New Zealander [no – see Jenny’s comment below].

As a law student in New Zealand after serving in Ethiopia with the US Peace Corps, he was a driving force behind the founding of Wellington’s Newtown Community Law Centre (inspired by the first one established in Grey Lynn by Robert Ludbrook). Those student volunteer law centres evolved into the current network of community law centres. I know this because he persuaded Nicola Crutchley (until recently Deputy Solicitor General) and me to help him.

Service with our Ministry of Foreign Affairs was too structured for the young Jim Clad. I can not remember whether he left to write for the Far Eastern Economic Review, but that certainly followed shortly after.

Will his familiarity help our case for reinstatement of the kind of mutual trust we had with our main allies before we became only very very very good friends? Who knows? Sometimes intimate knowledge can mean only better informed insult.

Our standing can not have been enhanced by the recent renewal of the shared big party hostility to all things nuclear. Did you know that our fear of facts is so extreme that it is an offence even to prospect for uranium in New Zealand? Just when the rest of the world is waking up to the stupidity of that kind of paranoia New Zealand’s two big parties renew their vows of irrationality.

There’s too much humbug over Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s donation to the Labour Party.

Good on him. Too few individuals are willing to put money where their principles are. He has not hidden his political stripes. He was a Labour PM. What could be more overt. The time to protest, if at all, was when he was appointed.

The Law Commission is a law reform body. Effective law reformers are rarely politically neutral. Passion is needed. As neutrals the Commission might have more clout in persuading Parliament to pass complex and boring technical reforms without reopening the whole case. On the other hand Sir Geoffrey’s connections seem to have assisted in getting some long overdue boring reforms up the Parliamentary agenda.

The cost for the government should be media and voter scepticism when he is used on  politically contentious matters. I understand, for example, that he may have authored the compromise words for the anti-smacking bill that delivered the victory to the PM and Sue Bradford. That should have put the opponents on high guard.

He’s keeping his side of the deal, and his appointors seem to be delivering on theirs –  holding time slots for long shelved Commission Bills, and not allowing the Ministry of Justice to stall them.

The price for Sir Geoffrey should be to offer his resignation when there is a change of government. A shrewd government might not accept. It is useful to know the best arguments that your opponents can throw at you. 

Hail to Joe Karam, and Dunedin’s Colin Withnell QC who selflessly campaigned against what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice.  Whether Bain is innocent or not, they have upheld one of the finest traditions of our civilization – tireless effort and personal sacrifice on behalf of a non-relation, in defence of a principle.

The Privy Council decision is also a catastrophic affirmation of the size of our loss when we abandoned our right to neutral international referees.  Joe Karam called this morning for the resignation of the two Supreme Court judges who refused an appeal while on the Court of Appeal.  That kind of erosion of confidence in the quality of justice in New Zealand was inevitable from the moment the “indigenisers”, led by Hon Margaret Wilson, got their hands on the tiller.

They lied blithely, claiming it would save money. In fact, as those of us who fought abolition in Parliament warned,  the Supreme Court has been vastly more expensive than  the Privy Council.

Whose decisions are inferior is irrelevant.  The right of appeal to neutral outsiders was a priceless assurance of integrity for our otherwise unhealthily small hot house legal cabal. Even if it was not needed to keep our judges honest, the prospect of appeal outside made it pointless to try to stack our judiciary with political cronies. Now of course it is tempting.

Our legal profession thinks its privileges are justified by their championing of the the rule of law, of the rights of the citizen against the state.  Some individual lawyers do that, typified by the lawyers who have worked on the Bain case, and others such as rights lawyer Tony Ellis.  But to me as an MP their advocacy as a ‘profession’ was marked by cowardly group think, often self interested,  and suffusing political correctness. 

This last Privy Council case is a sad measure of our exposure to that group think.

Published in Capital Times – December 2006

This book justifies its prominence in Wellington bookshops. If you get it for Christmas it will not be from the remainder bin.

In 1974 Kit Bennetts’ work resulted in the arrest of well-connected, high ranking left-wing retired public servant Dr William Ball Sutch for spying for the Soviets. I did not know the SIS man. Now Bennetts reminds me of how many of my friends thought they knew him well enough to believe they must drive him out of the country, though I think only George Rosenberg ever spoke to him.

The book is an embarrassing reminder of the anti-SIS credulity we shared.

My first student demonstration was in 1969, outside the SIS offices in Taranaki Street.. I recall our bemusement when Attorney General, Dr Martyn Findlay QC showed plainly he was on “our” side against the Official Secrets Act, yet authorised the Sutch prosecution. We were blissfully unaware of Findlay’s flakiness.

I’d forgotten how Dr Brian Edwards, Alister Taylor and other more inveterate conspiracy believers tried to make life such a misery for Bennetts’ workmates. I’d rather forget how many of my student generation’s beliefs have turned to mush.

For those who were not there, think “anti-globalisation” for a glimpse of the mindset. A mixture of slogans, fervour, myth and fragmentary facts create a secular political religion. The religion then justifies the universal appeal to young men of smashing things and causing offence to force others to your will. For the ‘intellectuals’ of my youth the transcendant causes were apartheid, and Vietnam. A generalised anti-establishment rage excused vandalism, assault and other offences against the despised ordinary people who did not share our faiths.

My friends spent days fundraising and fulminating against the SIS after Sutch’s acquittal, for its perfidy in pursuing him. I’d probably have been helping, if defence lawyer Michael Bungay had not intimated to me that Sutch was guilty the night he got Sutch acquitted (see www.stephenfranks.co.nz). As a new agnostic on that cause I ‘sifted’ out of action.

But even if I’d stayed a believer that Sutch was a victim of the vast right wing conspiracy, reading this book now would have been a duty. The other side should get a chance to make its case.

I picked up Henry Kissinger’s memoirs with that feeling of obligation. As an anti-Vietnam war demonstrator I’d shouted passionately against all I thought he stood for. So it was my duty to give him a chance to explain himself. Kissinger’s intelligence and the facts took over. I could not put his book down.

Bennetts is no Kissinger, but “Spy” gains a similar grip. Of course, for a Wellingtonian there is the fascination of revelation mixed with the mundane familiar. It is intriguing to be reminded of events in streets you know, that ought to have jarred the intellectual smugness of an entire generation, but did not.

As a vignette of its time the book is a worthy read. I noticed no errors in the ample references.

But it is also fun to read. Apt quotations begin each chapter. The spycatching tale buzzes along. Bennetts may not be a Le Carre, but the “Boys Own” breeziness rings true to me. I have yet to come across a high performing work team culture that could not be satirised as ‘gung ho’. 

I imagine our intelligence services people will resent Bennetts’ breach of the convention against former officers doing “show and tell” books. They may be consoled by the quality of this one.

Random House October 2006 $36.99