The Sensible Sentencing Trust, a lobby group based in Napier in New Zealand, promotes harsher court sentences as a means of reducing crime.
The Trust states its vision as "A Safe New Zealand" and its mission as "(t)o obtain a large base of community support, and ensure safety for all New Zealanders from violent and criminal offending, through education, development of effective penal policies, and the promotion of responsible behaviour, accountable parenting, and respect for each other at all levels of society."[1]
The Trust's national spokesperson, Garth McVicar, ranked at 32 in the 2006 New Zealand Listener Power List, a list of 50 influential New Zealand people.
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The Sensible Sentencing Trust supports boot camps as proposed in policy of the National Party.[2]
In 2009 the Trust supported the controversial appointment of former Work and Income Chief Executive Christine Rankin as a Families Commissioner.[3]
The Trust supported one of its representatives, David Garrett, as number 5 on the ACT Party list in the New Zealand general election in 2008: he entered parliament on the list vote. Garrett has had a mixed performance as an MP, making a number of controversial comments.[4][5]. Garrett was found to have disclosed two previous misdemeanors; the first involved the stealing of a deceased childs identity in 1984 to obtain a false passport; he later had an assault conviction in Tonga which resulted in a fine. The passport case was discovered in 2005 and Garrett was discharged without conviction given the time between the offense and the trial; however, Garrett's legal practicing certificate may be revoked as he failed to disclose the assault conviction in a sworn affidavit.[6]
The trust's call for harsher sentences has been criticised, especially seeing New Zealand's already high incarceration rates, which quadrupled between 1986 and 2005, despite research showing that criminals are more likely to re-offend after longer sentences.[7]
A group called the "Really Sensible Sentencing Trust" formed in response to what it saw as the overly harsh law-and-order stance of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Labour list MP Russell Fairbrother announced the formation of the new group, but did not at the time reveal the names of its members.[8]
An editorial of the New Zealand Herald in November 2009 noted that the trust had been created at least in part to defend Mark Middleton - prosecuted for threatening to kill Paul Dally,[9] who tortured, raped, and killed Middleton's 13 year old stepdaughter Karla Cardno. The editorial noted, "It is better that politicians draft the law coolly, and that judges administer that law consistently, than that they join a noose-waving lynch mob led by Garth McVicar."[7]
More recently, a rehabilitation-oriented lobby group, Rethinking Crime and Punishment, has been established to represent a more nuanced and less populist or conservative approach to criminal justice policy in New Zealand, including analyses of the social context and causes of criminal activity [10]