From Stuff

New Zealand had the second highest imprisonment rate in the world, with an overrepresentation and disproportionate rate of Maori prisoners. “This has attracted comment from the United Nations and overseas media.”

This is half right. There is certainly serious overrepresentation of Maori in the prison population. However, New Zealand doesn’t have the second highest imprisonment rate in the world. Or even in the OECD. And it’s not hard to find this out.

The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Te Ara, gives this graph, dated May 2011, for OECD countries, referencing the International Center for Prison Studies (PDF)

Wikipedia has NZ in 74th place for all countries, referencing the same source, behind most of the Caribbean, much of the former Eastern Bloc, and Samoa. So, whether you’re going for easily accessible online references like Wikipedia and Te Ara or actual expert data curation, you get the same results.

New Zealand’s imprisonment rate is too high. I don’t see a good reason why it should be much higher than, say, Australia or the less wealthy Western European countries. But it’s not second in the world by any reasonable definition of “the world”.

(Update: Graeme Edgeler wrote about another airing of this recently, which I had thought I remembered, but couldn’t find when writing this.)

