Three Strikes Bill reintroduced despite evidence punishment fails – Te Ao Māori News

With the reintroduction of the three-strikes law, the government intends to give top priority to restoring law and order by cracking down on crime.

Similar to military boot camps, the bill uses a consequences model based on the ideology that punishment leads to change.

The reintroduction of the law will restore the main features of the three-strikes regime, which was repealed in 2022.

For the first offense, offenders are warned of the consequences, for the second offense they are denied parole, and for the third offense they must serve the maximum sentence without parole.

Emmy Rākete, a criminologist and lecturer at the University of Auckland, says criminalisation does not reduce crime or violence and there is evidence that punishment does not prevent recidivism.

Deputy Attorney General Nicole McKee said it would send a strong message to repeat offenders that they would face increasingly serious consequences and would keep “violent criminals” off the streets.

Rākete argues that this will neither fight crime nor prevent violence; it will simply shift violence to prisons, where violence is concentrated.

She says that those incarcerated – often both victims and perpetrators – emerge from the cases even more traumatized, which creates all the social conditions that encourage crime.

Rākete calls on the government to focus more on combating the social conditions that enable violence.

New Zealand has the highest rate of domestic violence in the developed world. Victims of domestic violence should be able to leave their partners, but cannot because they are financially dependent and would become homeless.

The bill has been revised since the last three-strikes law:

• Adds the new offence of strangulation and suffocation to the more than 40 serious violent and sexual offences that were covered by the previous regulation
• Focuses on serious crimes by applying the three-strikes law only to sentences over 24 months
• Imposes long prison sentences without parole for murder victims: 17 years for the second offense and 20 years for the third offense
• Provides some judicial discretion to avoid manifestly unfair outcomes and to deal with outlier cases
• Establishes principles and guidelines to facilitate the court’s application of the new law
• Allows for a limited advantage in plea bargains to avoid re-traumatizing victims and reduce delays in trial.

The bill will be discussed in first reading IThe Bill will be tabled in Parliament House later this week before being referred to the Justice Committee. The Deputy Minister for Justice is encouraging the public to have their say on the Bill at the Select Committee stage.