If crime is down - why are we building new private prisons?

So crime is down, yet we are still spending a billion on a new private prison whom Serco told the London Stock Exchange this month would earn them $29 million each year.

The contract is for 25 years.

By 2014, NZ will have the highest proportion of prisoners in private prisons than any other country in the world. How this has been allowed to happen with zero public discussion over the social impacts of creating profit incentives for incarceration astounds me.

The mainstream media use crime to whip up public fury which is harvested by the Sensible Sentencing lynch mob to erode our corrections department into glorified gulags.

How disappointing for them that crime has been going down then, how will the mainstream media cope without another 'Beast of Blenheim' to chase ratings and how will the Sensible Sentencing Trust manage without manipulating victim grief into a political lobby?

The crime stats show up the lie beyond media's myopic focus. When you look beyond the screaming headlines, NZ is not some post apocalyptic Mad Max world requiring Dirty Harry to sort out.

But what do the crime stats actually show? They show that the destruction of the Christchurch CBD is most responsible for the decline while Auckland's CBD crime rate lifts.

It shows that the Police's decision in April to hide domestic abuse violence has paid a great dividend and it shows that the Police's new ability to seize the assets of drug dealers has led to a whopping 70% increase in drug crimes.

Don't expect any of these critiques to even surface during media interviews with Police this week.

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