Habitual criminal legislation in New Zealand: Three years of three-strikes

Abstract

Habitual felon legislation is not new, but during the last 20 years it has become a powerful instrument of penal populism. Since passage of California's landmark 1994 three-strikes initiative, more than 100,000 offenders have been incarcerated in that state, contributing to prison crowding so serious that, in 2011, in Brown v. Plata, the United States Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by 46,000 persons. While the Californian three-strikes law is unusually draconian, habitual offender legislation also has been enacted in Australia and, more recently, in New Zealand. While little official data are available about New Zealand’s three-strikes law, preliminary analysis indicates that minority groups are overrepresented in the three-strikes population, and that three-strikes demographics resemble those of the New Zealand general prison population.

Exploring Autonomy in the Finnish and New Zealand Penal Voluntary Sectors: The Relevance of Marketisation and Criminal Justice Policy Environments in Two Penal Voluntary Sector Organisations

“…The opinions of those who claim to speak for the public or victims of serious crime have been given particular credence in public debate and penal policymaking, over those of criminal justice elites and professionals (Bartlett ). The primary example of this is the Sensible Sentencing Trust, an advocacy VCO which has been remarkably successful in galvanising cross‐party political support for its key aims of obtaining tougher sentences for violent offenders and increased rights for victims (Bartlett ; Grey and de Roo ; Oleson ; Pratt and Clark ). This, coupled with sensationalist media and general distrust of experts in New Zealand, has ensured that criminal justice experts who have dared to critique punitive policies have become the target of vilification and personal attack (Grey and de Roo ; Pratt and Clark ).…”

Policy mobilities and comparative penality

“…In 2012 Queensland passed the Criminal Law (Two Strike Child Sex Offenders) Amendment Act, which mandated life imprisonment with a 20-year non-parole period, for repeat serious child sex offenders. In New Zealand, following a national campaign led by a victim’s advocacy charity known as the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST), the government adopted its own version of ‘three strikes’ sentencing legislation in 2010 (Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010; see Oleson, 2015). Seeking to differentiate itself from the original Californian approach, described by SST as ‘too tough’, New Zealand’s legislation only applies the third-strike provision to ‘serious violent or sexual offences, not minor crime’.…”

Manifest Injustice? The Judiciary as Moderator of Penal Excess in the Sentencing of Youth for Murder

“…Such political and public acceptance of the tempering of the most punitive sentences for youth is already apparent in New Zealand, where legislators have considered some sentences to be completely inappropriate for youth. A further period of penal populism in 2010 saw the introduction of a sentence of life without parole as part of a ‘three strikes’ sentencing regime (Oleson ; Sentencing Act, s. 86E). Offenders aged under 18 years were exempted on the basis that ‘it would be inappropriate for these sanctions to apply to a person under 18 at the time of the offence, who may not have fully appreciated the seriousness of their conduct or the consequences that would follow’ (Ministry of Justice ).…”