Plans on how the government will deal with a ballooning prison population are set to be revealed today, as the future of Waikeria Prison, located south of Hamilton, is to be decided on.

1 NEWS NOW will have the latest developments on the announcement.

In May, the Government announced it would not develop a $1 billion mega prison in place of the ageing Waikeria Prison. Six-hundred rapid-build modular units were to be created in the meantime however, after $198.4 million was set aside in the 2018 Budget. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern then said the change to bail laws and a range of other factors, were contributing to the high prison population.

For more on this story, watch 1 NEWS at 6pm. Source: 1 NEWS

Yesterday, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis described Waikeria Prison as having been "built for a different time".

"There's a lack of facilities to support rehabilitation and reintegration, educational facilities. The cells are small. It's really important our facilities are up to scratch to cater for those people who are in prison to make sure they don't go on to reoffend once they're out," he said.

Also in May, National MP and former Justice Minister Judith Collins was critical of any potential changes to the bail law, saying her concern was "always about public safety".

"They're the same people who are beating up their spouses, those are the people we're talking about, and I don't want to see those people out. There's a good place for them, it's called prison."

1 NEWS spoke to groups and experts about what they thought should be done to combat New Zealand's rising prison population, and if they agreed a mega-prison should be built.

Alan Whitley | Corrections Association New Zealand President

What are the key actions that could combat New Zealand’s rising prison population?

1. Deal with the causes of crime – poverty, lack of jobs, lack of education, lack of positive role models.

2. Focus priority on the young, to stop them taking those first steps down the criminal path.

3. Adequate resourcing to manage the return of offenders into the Community – housing; rehab/reintegration programmes; a prisoner is released, gets $350 steps to freedom, has no family or support network, can’t find somewhere to live, why do we expect any different outcome?

Should the mega-prison be built?

The Government needs to build a prison of sufficient capacity to allow for the old top prison at Waikeria to be closed and provide sufficient capacity to house the predicted prisoner growth in modern cells preferably designated to single cell occupancy in line with the UN guidelines. The capacity should also be sufficient to allow the decommissioning or setting aside for disaster recovery the double bunked cells that have been retrofitted in other prisons around the country.

Source: 1 NEWS

Tania Sawicki Mead | Director of JustSpeak

What are the key actions that could combat New Zealand’s rising prison population?

1. To immediately reduce the rising prison population the Government needs to reverse the 2013 changes to the Bail Act, which contributes to the fact that 30 per cent of people being held in prison have not been sentenced to prison.

2. Parole and sentencing laws also need to change, because longer sentences have a huge impact on the prison population but are very ineffective at deterring offending.

3. We also need to start investing in preventative initiatives that would help people address their needs before they end up in the justice system; more money for mental health, drug and alcohol addiction treatment, and proactive support for people at risk of experiencing family violence.

Should the mega-prison be built?

We think there are far more effective ways for us to spend a billion dollars that would actually help to reduce offending, make our communities safer and ensure better outcomes for children and families. Prisons do not achieve those goals, and building a new prison or expanding an existing one at Waikeria will not help us understand why our prison population grows while crime is trending downwards.

Source: 1 NEWS

Max Harris | Author of The New Zealand Project

What are the key actions that could combat New Zealand’s rising prison population?

1. Repeal the Bail Act 2013, responsible for a sharp increase in the remand prison population (people not yet convicted of a crime).

2. Make greater use of - and provide legislative support for - problem-solving courts (such as drug courts), which provide structured and supervised rehabilitation for low-level offending.

3. Educate judges and lawyers on existing sentencing tools which can provide a more informed basis for sentencing, such as s 27 of the Sentencing Act (which might be used to reduce Māori over-representation in prison). Also: invest in sexual violence prevention services, continue debate about drug law reform, review overall sentencing levels.

Should the mega-prison be built?

No, because there's evidence that the design of the mega-prison was rushed and not of high-quality. Moreover, caging more and more New Zealanders is not making us safer as a country, is tearing families apart, and is expensive; we need a new approach to criminal justice and not building this prison is a way to start that conversation.

Source: 1 NEWS

Criminologist Professor Greg Newbold

What are key actions that could combat New Zealand’s rising prison population?

In reality, nothing much can be done to address NZ’s rising prison population. The Government's goal of reducing the prison population by 30 per cent in the next 15 years is a pipe dream.

a. Why? As long as serious violent and sexual crimes continue to rise (i.e. the types of crime that people get sent to prison for), then populations will continue to increase. This is especially the case with very serious crimes which attract long sentences with long non-parole minimums.

b. What about reducing the remand population? About 30% of our prison population are remands, but reducing the remand population will have limited effect because remand prisoners are serving time. If you let them out of jail they cease serving time and so their jail time is just deferred. In any case, 50% of all bail remands offend on bail and get sent locked up for that reason.

c. Why not liberalise parole? Currently paroleable prisoners (serving more than two years) serve an average of 78 per cent of their sentences. This per cent has been rising since 2002, because so many prisoners on parole reoffend or breach their conditions. This has made the parole board risk-averse with regard to giving parole in the first place, or recalling them for parole violations. This is another reason that prison populations are rising. If you let them out early, they soon reoffend and are returned to jail. The prison population thus soon returns to what it was before.

d. How about reducing reoffending by increasing prisons’ rehabilitative potential? Governments have been trying to reduce recidivism through the use of various programs since 1910. None has ever succeeded, nor are they ever likely to. Programmes are expensive and their effectiveness is limited.

e. Is anything being done? Various strategies are currently being contemplated, such as improving the efficiency with which bail and parole applications are processed, and increasing the use of home detention, etc. These will have limited effect. The most that can be hoped for is that the growth in prison populations may be slowed down, perhaps temporarily. But achieving a significant, long-term reduction in our prison population is not a realistic objective.

f. What are the political implications? The Government needs to tread carefully, and heed the lesson of its failure to abolish Three Strikes. In spite of the fact that sentences such as Three Strikes are ineffective and non-logical, a large proportion of the electorate has a visceral desire to have dangerous offenders locked up for a long time. A Government that is seen to be soft on crime is going to lose a lot of voter support.

Should the mega-prison be built?

Well we need something, that's for sure.

Prison populations are rising and prisons are getting overcrowded. This makes prisons dangerous places to live and work in, and reduces any small rehabilitative potential that they still have. Doubling inmates up is not healthy. It hasn’t been widely publicised, but officers at Auckland Prison East division (the maximum security prison) are getting assaulted regularly, with a result that on several occasions whole shifts have rung in sick, in protest at the conditions they have to work in. The new maxi soon to be opened may help solve this problem, but it won't solve the national issue of too many prisoners and not enough cells.

Kevin Tso | Victim Support Chief Executive

Should the mega-prison be built?

For many of the victims that seek support from us, seeing their offender receive an appropriate penalty can be important to feeling that justice has been served and to moving on with their own lives. At the same time, prison can entrench long term criminal behaviours and dependency. It's a real balancing act.

The most important outcome for us is reducing future offending and harm to stop people becoming victims in the first place. Will building more prisons achieve that? That’s not for us to say, but there does need to be a well-informed discussion about whether we are getting the right mix of investment between prevention, rehabilitation, and incarceration.

Emmy Rākete | People Against Prisons Aotearoa

What are key actions that could combat New Zealand’s rising prison population?

1. The number one thing which has to be done to reduce New Zealand's rising prison population is to reduce inequality. Data released to PAPA under the Official Information Act showed that up to 87 per cent of prisoners were unemployed before they were incarcerated. Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister's former Chief Science Advisor, recently found that 91 per cent of prisoners are mentally ill or suffer from addiction, 77 per cent have been victims of violence, 48 per cent were victims of family violence as children. It's clear that New Zealand's prisons are a warehouse for our country's dispossessed, our poor. Until we radically redistribute wealth in this country, our prisons will always be used to contain and control this population.

2. In more immediate policy terms, our prisons are full because we are filling them up. Almost a quarter of the people filling our prisons haven't been found guilty of anything - they're being detained before their trial. This is because the Bail Amendment Act reversed the presumption of innocence, requiring prisoners to prove they are non-dangerous rather than requiring prosecutors to demonstrate that a given prison would be a threat to the community. This has led to thousands of non-violent offenders being kept in prison on remand. We could reverse this bizarre, unconstitutional law now and re-evaluate thousands of people.

3. New Zealand's prisons are completely non-rehabilitative. Within three years of release, 50 per cent of ex-prisoners are locked up again. As Sir Peter Gluckman's recent report showed, prisoners overwhelmingly suffer from immense mental health problems, and we should see our prison population for what it is: a mental health crisis. We need to provide for people's needs, ensuring they have access to mental healthcare, psychiatric and therapeutic intervention before their suffering becomes so bad that they act in ways that harm others. We need to develop new interventions that don't rely on the idea that we can lock people in cages and expect them to learn gentleness.

Should the mega-prison be built?