One of the Labour government’s targets is to reduce the prison population1.
What Happened?
The prison population has reduced 19% since Labour got into power2.
Simultaneously, crime increased. Here’s a graph showing crime since 2019 (which is as far back as I could find from the government data):
The drop seen in 2020 represents the COVID lockdown. Otherwise you can see a 50.34% increase and steady trend line from the start of the dataset in 2019 to the peak in 2023.
Here’s a graph showing historic crime (unfortunately I couldn’t get data this far back from a government source).
Note: When I hovered over the last column of data, the year said 2019, not 2018 as the graph would suggest. I don’t know if this is an error in the data or in the graphing software (perhaps year 2018 data was missing and the software didn’t handle that correctly?).
Analysis
I’m reluctant to trust the historic data from non government sources, even though it feels right and fits the media’s narrative. Nevertheless, disregarding this data and only looking at the government sourced data shows the same results.
You can see a direct correlation between reducing the prison population and the increase in crime… and the increase has been significant. Looking at the government sourced data alone tells us that crime has increased over 50% since 2019. If we look at the start of the decline of the prison population, we can see that this happened in 2018, which gives credence to the non government sourced historic data which tells us that crime increased by 253.88% between 2017 and 20193. So a 50% increase on 253.88% would mean that crime could be over 5 times worse than it was before Labour came to power depending on where the overlap is in the two datasets - but wherever the overlap lies, it’s not good.
One might argue that this is a natural progression of society or due to cultural changes resulting from COVID, however the government data shows that this was on the increase after the policy but prior to COVID and (if the non government data is to be trusted) that crime was generally on a decrease before the policy.
What’s more interesting is that this increase in crime is contrary to employment stats. With lower unemployment we would expect that there would be less needs-based crime happening. However, crime is up despite unemployment being down4, from which you could conclude that crime is being done for other reasons (such as for fun or lack of consequences) - though an argument to the contrary may be that with the reduction of the prison population, we now have more people who’s needs aren’t catered for. While there may be some validity to that, it’s countered by the fact that there are new types of crime to NZ such as ram raids, many of which have been reported as not stealing resellable or needed things, such as sweets (citation needed).
Over all, reducing the prison population appears to be an horrific policy failure that has resulted in a massive increase in crime, having a catastrophic effect on the population of New Zealand.
Unemployment stats available here: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/crime-rate-statistics