UNLIKELY PAIR FIND COMMON GROUND IN PRISON JUNKET

One of the strangest couples on the Japan Air Lines/Air New Zealand
flight from Frankfurt via Tokyo to Christchurch last weekend must
have been Garth McVicar and Kim Workman.

Mr McVicar, the Sensible Sentencing Trust founder who has been the
scourge of politicians who are "soft on crime", spent most of
Waitangi Day in the air with Mr Workman, the liberal former deputy
secretary of justice who is now head of the Prison Fellowship.

"He was fantastic, a really genuine guy. He's done a lot of work with
offenders," Mr McVicar said.

Mr Workman was slightly more guarded. "We got on well. I think there
are some things we agree on," he said.

The odd pair were invited to Europe at taxpayers' expense by
Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor to look for ways of reducing New
Zealand's fast-rising prison population, which is now proportionately
higher than any other developed country except the United States.

Mr O'Connor stayed on for a tobacco control conference in Geneva, but
Mr McVicar and Mr Workman returned together on Tuesday.

Mr McVicar said their first surprise came when they arrived at the
International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College, London.

"They use New Zealand as an example of what not to do - how our
prison population is escalating and our level of violent crime is
increasing," he said.

"They educate other countries on what is working on a worldwide basis
since New Zealand is an example of what not to do. That was possibly
a bit of a shock to all of us."

Both were impressed by "open prisons" they saw in Britain and the
Netherlands, where prisoners go out to work during the day, return to
jail at night, and stay with their families at weekends.

"I think we should do that," Mr McVicar said. "They have sorted out
what they call the hard-core recidivists, who stay in the closed
prison system and they don't put huge resources into that end of it.

"They do have the opportunity at some stage of their sentences to
come into that half-open prison system, but not at the very early
stage of their sentences when some of the other offenders might."

He said he was "a big fan of community work", provided it was
properly enforced.

"If the Government are going to implement changes, they have to take
the public with them, and that means that nothing we do is seen as a
soft option," he said.

"If you commit a crime, you have to pay the price for that crime.
That philosophy must stay. The only debate as far as I'm concerned is
whether it should be in prison or whether you should be out there
working, repaying your debt in other ways."

Mr Workman, in turn, took a leaf out of the get-tough lobby's script
after seeing the "huge problem" with drugs in the Netherlands, where
drugs have been decriminalised.

"They have all these very seriously addicted drug offenders," he
said. "If there was any lesson that came out of that, it was that we
shouldn't liberalise the drug laws more than we have."

In Finland, both men noted that prison numbers have gone up again
after a deliberate policy cut the imprisonment rate from around 200
in 100,000 people in 1950 to around 50 today. New Zealand's rate has
doubled since 1980 to 164 in 100,000.

"The Finnish population feels they have gone a little too far, and
what's happening is a change in the society because they are now
starting to get drug offenders coming in from Russia and Estonia," Mr
Workman said.

Mr McVicar said New Zealand could learn from a system used in
Finland, the Netherlands and New South Wales, where the state pays
reparation to victims of crimes and then extracts the money from the
wages or welfare benefits of criminals when they leave jail.