Thanks for the explanation. While I definitely agree that offenses exist that should not result in prison time, I cannot agree with the above. This assumes that people are reasonable and can at least learn to be considerate of others.

For example, in the case of white-collar crime where psychopathic CEO/Shareholders/etc consistently find ways to increase profits at the expense of everyone else, I think prison is the only place they should ever be. There's a difference between a guy selling tinnies and a guy who offloads HIV infected blood to poorer countries and infects thousands of people.

Until we have a societal shift that eliminates the possibility of being solely profit (or selfishly) motivated, I would like to keep the prisons.

That's fantastic, thanks! The original article doesn't really tackle the subject of prison abolition, just that TPM want it. That email tells me a lot about how the system would work.

It didn't take much to convince me, but now I'm a fan of this approach (ok, to be fair I was already keen on a better system than putting all the minor criminals in a big group together to reenforce the behavior). Unfortunately we wouldn't see societal results within a couple of election cycles so it's hard to see how this could actually become reality without the risk of getting cut at the next government change. But this is the kind of future-thinking policy I like to see.

That last note on the larger group of people causing death & destruction is one I find really interesting. I watched a video a year or so ago from Philosophy Tube that among other things talked about what violence is, or can be. Which in a way flips the narrative on violent crime - at least the narrative you read in our major dailies or see on TV.

There's a lot of talk about the impact of violent crime, but if you start thinking about what violence is first, you realise violent crime is just a very narrow subset of violence that our system chooses to address. The same system ignores all sorts of other violence - or in some cases even supports it.

So then when you think, 'well why is this subset a crime, but all this other stuff isn't?', its not a long road to realising that a lot of stuff that isn't crime are activities that by design or not service to reinforce power & privilege. Which then starts to make you wonder about a whole bunch of other crime & justice issues in general, eg when a welfare recipient might get hounded for desperately grabbing some cash they weren't entitled to, but some rich person can fleece millions and get away with it.

That's very interesting, and it makes sense.

My flippant response is to ask why such a commonly asked question isn't part of the lecture. Though maybe it was touched in briefly and easily forgotten.

Most people in this country are too stupid, too racist, too cruel and too venegeful to even listen to somebody say something like this let alone accept it as policy.

They simply want prisoners to be hurt as much as humanly possible. If you told them you were going to torture them by peeling their skin off they would vote for you.

These people are genuinely completely out of touch with reality, aren't they?

I don't think the idea of people who have committed absolute atrocities being "managed in the community" will be a popular one with the voting public.

Oh I have a follow up question that you may or may not know the answer to. On rereading, I noticed they used the term "habilitation", not "rehabilitation". Is there significance in this distinction?

Thanks for the answer it’s naïveté is astounding.

Oh yeah, I'm referring to centrist voters who are weighing up the pros/cons between a rightwing coalition and a leftwing one - which would in all likelihood include TPM. Of course not all minor party policies can or should appeal to that group, but I can see this pushing more than a few people over to NACT.

Yeah, prisons are a waste of money. Better to compost criminals instead, thus they will be able to provide some benefit to the society.

Too soon.

Your first sentence mocks and derides anybody who advocated for rehabilitation and training of prisoners. What a sleazy way to doublespeak.

Me too.

Society has a limit to how much of "crime X" they'll tolerate.

Some should be exactly one: murder, rape, toture, etc. I'd argue that provable attempts at those count as one, so the threshold is actually less than one.

I feel like pretty much everything else can be "civil" consequences:

• financial crimes: forbidden from holding a position with fiduciary responsibility, repayment, punitive damages.
• theft: restitution, punitive damages, restraining orders

What I'm really unsure about is, arguably, progenitors to violence:

• drink driving? Lose license, curfew? What happens when they do it again and hurt someone?
• harassment? Restraining orders? What happens when it escalates?

Just to throw a few into discussion.

Thanks for compiling that detailed list. Don't forget their thoughts on education - they seem to basically want to privatise public education and only make it "public" in the sense they give children a bit of money to pay for their own schooling. Naturally it doesn't add up to what is already spent per child. If a child hasn't lived in this country since they were two years old they're even worse off, even if they are rightful citizens.

They're anti-student, too, wanting to remove caps on tertiary fees and gut fees free education. They want to defund Callaghan Innovation which provides internships for students. Those internships go a long way in helping people get jobs in the fields they studied in. Seymour is also anti interest free loans - they're not campaigning to remove them this year, but it's enough to put me on edge. This makes me believe they have no regard for the interests of young, skilled New Zealanders who are a flight ticket away from fucking off to Australia.

The end goal of all their policies seems to be to emulate the joke that is the USA. I have issues with this specific policy of TPM but I wouldn't touch ACT with a 10 foot pole if my life was on the line.