A Letter from New Zealand: Home Detention—Emerging Issues After the First Three Years

Abstract

Home detention in New Zealand began on 1st October 1999, having developed from a political climate of punitiveness towards offenders and a desire to introduce tougher parole or post-imprisonment supervision regimes (Gibbs and King, 2002). Home detention had been unsuccessfully piloted in New Zealand in the mid-1990s (Church and Dunstan, 1997), but this made little difference to the National government of the day as it introduced a full-blown scheme through an amendment to the Criminal Justice Act 1985. The current scheme is promoted as a means of reintegration into the community for people who have been in prison, or as a diversion from imprisonment for people given prison sentences of up to two years. This piece will explore the operation and impact of home detention in its first three years (1999 to 2002), and consider some of its successes and limitations, in the light of its aims to reintegrate and divert.