But, in a word, "No".

When a Parliamentary Select Committee considered the overwhelming support for Norm Withers’ referendum, Ministry of Justice officials cast doubt on the result by claiming that people may have been confused by the wording. They refrained from using the term "ignorant masses", but the inference was clear.

Brigadier Bret Bestic (pictured, right), who’s just finished a tour of duty at Paremoremo Prison, wants intelligent debate and dialogue on the vexed issue of crime and punishment.

Bestic was the Regional Manager of Paremoremo from August 1998 until December 1999, responsible for 640 inmates, 350 staff and a $21 million budget. He initiated an extensive review of management and operating procedures that were later adopted as a national model.

What qualifications did he bring to the job? A ‘Sword of Honour’ officer cadet at Duntroon Military College, Bestic served as an infantry captain in Borneo and Vietnam, followed by a succession of increasingly senior postings: CO of the NZ Battalion in Singapore, Director of Infantry and the SAS, Human Resources manager for the Army, Commander Waiouru Camp and finally Brigadier, Commander of NZ Land Forces.

From 1994 to 1995, Bestic served with United Nations in former Yugoslavia as Chief of Field Administration, co-ordinating the logistics for 45,000 troops from five countries. In the 1999 elections, he was a list candidate for the National Party.

Implicit in such a career is a talent for leadership and the capacity to be a shrewd judge of character, of human strengths and weakness within an organisation. Bestic was considered to have the right stuff to run "Pare" and to begin with, he recalls his comments on the Holmes programme, one of only two media outlets to consider his opinions important. "We have stumbled into a debate about a very critical issue (crime and punishment). We went to a referendum and 92% of the voters said ‘yes’ to a sentence that included the requirement for hard labour. Hard labour is in fact corporal punishment, which once you introduce it, then you revive the debate about capital punishment.

"If there is a continuum of punishments then you have to decide what to do with the very worst of your criminals - and work back from there. We have decided in a rather ad hoc way, that we want some people to have hard labour. It is part of a continuing trend in New Zealand where about every ten years or so we decide that a decision was wrong and we remove some form of punishment. "We have added alternatives in some areas, but they have been soft options. The result is that since the 1950s we stopped flogging people, we stopped hanging them and we missed out on shipping them to Tasmania. So what we have is a grown ups’ version of ‘go to your room - get out of my sight.’

"When people talk about tougher or harder punishments under present law, the only option we have at the moment is longer - and is that actually what we want, or do we want some form of physical punishment as one of the options made available to the judiciary? If we don’t, well let’s debate that and put it to rest.

"But when 92% of people say that they want to do something about it; that tells you that the judicial system is not serving the public - and that they are not reflecting the opinions of the society they serve."

Bret Bestic argues that by choosing a piecemeal and secretive approach to wanting harder punishment options without preparatory public debate, the timid side of New Zealand society has been exposed. There is a reluctance to debate sensitive issues in public through fear of robust debate degenerating into acrimonious argument. People are afraid of losing their friends by expressing an opinion.

The 92% vote is a clear sign that the debate should be aired, and New Zealanders should be prepared for a mature exchange of views, rather than be cowed by verbal blackmail such as the intimidatory epithets: "bigot, redneck, extremist" and so on.

Writes Bestic in The Dominion: "those opposed to capital or corporal punishment, will claim that the prospect of death is not a deterrent, ignoring the other factors in the punishment equation and that imprisonment has not been a deterrent either, but we have no intention of abolishing it."

"They may say it is not civilised, ignoring the practices of China, India, much of the Muslim world and the USA among others. Neither corporal or capital punishment needs to be mandatory, but could be reserved for specific circumstances. Whatever we want, please let us debate it openly and without fear or favour.

"We have limited our ability to make the punishment fit the crime. The right of society to punish its criminals lies at the heart of any civilisation. The forms of punishment include the primary components of retribution, deterrence, denunciation and incapacitation in various portions.

Rehabilitation is not part of the punishment formula, but it may be specified or a desirable partner to it. The referendum showed that we want a review of the present mix of the punishment components.

All of the above comment is based on Bret Bestic’s experience of the criminal justice system, but before taking up his appointment as regional manager, he was just like the rest of Joe Public New Zealand confronting a land or place of mystery.

As he told Investigate, it was a voyage of discovery from public perception to actual reality:

"The worst of the worst, for periods of time, spend 23 hours a day in a very spartan room, smaller than the average bathroom, with no television, no radio; very few books and the opportunity to associate with one other inmate at a time. The 24th hour is when the door is unlocked, the inmate is greeted by three prison officers and he has the opportunity of one hour of recreation a day, or sometimes a telephone call. Now that is a miserable and robust life. The image however, is that the inmates are living in a motel-like environment, that is not the case at all.

"Now that was the first surprise. The other was the Prison Service, whose reputation suffers a lot. You’ll hear people saying that it is hard to distinguish between the guards and the inmates. About 80% of the staff out there are in the category of a national treasure. The work extremely hard at what they do. They deal with some particularly evil people and I think they do a job which is unheralded. The other 20% aren’t worth a day’s rations, but that is a classic 80-20 rule in any large organisation which employs a lot of people.

"After a while however, it became apparent to me that nobody knows what the actual answers are for reforming the inmates. Metaphorically, Pare is full of half-built memorials. Different folk came galloping up to the prison gates and said they had the final solution. Money was spent on one programme or another - and about half-way through, the guy sitting on his white charger realised that it wasn’t going to work, so he galloped off across the field and left the staff and inmates, half-way through a construction site; to wait for another few years until another guy came galloping up. So there was a problem with consistency."

Paremoremo has 60 paedophile inmates volunteering for the same course of rehabilitation as at Rolleston in the South Island. They are required to confront their problem and learn to avoid any occasions where children might be present.

Paeodophiles have the capacity to be expert manipulators, to a degree that Bret Bestic found chilling. "I met inmates who at the time seemed perfectly normal well-balanced human beings, charming and friendly. But when I studied their files, they were revealed as evil, evil predators - chilling in their capacity to deceive and manipulate."

Bestic took on the manager’s job, knowing that perhaps his greatest challenge would be dealing with the power and influence of the gangs within the prison. He considers that that the balance of power is now firmly in favour of the prison management and staff.

"The gangs have a far greater influence over their own kind than most people give them credit for. It is also a very significant factor in running a prison such as Paremoremo. Just to explain, we categorise prisoners on a number of factors and they are given a score. In a perfect world, the idea is that as their behaviour improves, they migrate from maximum down through the grades to end in minimum security.

"One of the greatest factors inhibiting a prisoner from moving down that scale, is the presence of the gangs. The gang numbers and the membership of any particular gang, is a factor in the allocation of prisoners. That indicates the hold over the gang members’ attitudes and loyalties.

"Some evidence of the strength of that hold, is seen in the sad cases of invariably Maori males in their early 20s, who are gang prospects. These are men who are trying to improve their status within the gang, or to become fully-fledged patched members; or simply seeking favours for when they get out of theft present sentence.

"Prospects run the errands, do the beatings, sometimes the stabbings, and the drug runs. They do the grubby work for all the gangs in general and the senior gang member who is in prison at that time. Imprisonment for all these people is just a phase. It is not a punishment, it is very irritating, but it is not seen as a punishment in the way society thinks it is. Then you are back to this whole business of how tough, or how rehabilitative, should a sentence be.

"I am not aware of anything in the law that requires rehabilitation by the way. The law requires incarceration, rehabilitation is something that comes later.

"A strong factor inhibiting prospects of rehabilitation, is the lack of any form of censuring from the families of inmates. Offending and imprisonment was just accepted as the norm. The fact that family members and relations try to smuggle in drugs and contraband like knives and weapons, is a form of approval. Therefore when these guys leave prison, they are back to the society from whence they have come. Imprisonment is not regarded as a bit of a joke, more an irritation, and a lot miss their kids. But they are not condemned by their own kind."

"The Prison Service for the last two years has been carrying out a very successful campaign to reduce the amount of drugs in prisons and the focus is primarily on marijuana. We had a lot of success with that in Paremoremo, where 36% of inmates being tested, were positive; and it came down to 16%. Unfortunately then there was an increase in harder drugs - not heroin, but different kinds like homebake. Pills are a lot easier to smuggle into prison, and the cost went up. The gangs were controlling this, and so the standard loan interest rate went up to 50% per week, for someone who couldn’t afford to pay cash.

"Now, if the debt went on for too long, then there would be a process beginning with the debtor being threatened. He may well be beaten up, his friends, family and particularly his wife or girlfriend would be threatened. But if repayment was still delayed, there is ample evidence of gangs then carrying out retribution on close friends, whanau, wife, girlfriend and brothers and sisters of the person in jail. So this Mafia-like influence spreads far wider than just the inside of a prison."

It is a depressing reality, but Bestic sees one possible solution and that is take the strengths of Maoridom and harness them for good.

"For example, and these are generalisations, Maoris are very good at sport, they have a strong swarming instinct, the whanau and the iwi. They love ceremony, appreciate and observe protocol. They admire their leaders, make great soldiers - and all of these strengths are there.

"What the gangs have done, is to harness those attributes and converted them for their own purposes. The gangs have created modern warlike tribes. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we tried maybe a Paremoremo patch and you ended up with a rehabilitation patch that guys wore with the same pride as a patch of the Black Power. I doubt very much if you find sociologists who would be prepared to explore that concept."

"Many of the inmates have a severely limited vocabulary, which means that they have no ways of articulating particular issues. Their only way of releasing emotions is physically, sometimes with drugs, sometimes through cultural means. But mostly you get this build-up of pressure and there is no outlet that many other people already have. They can’t read to see what other people have been like. They can’t compare experiences, other than through a vocabulary that is around 150 words - some of which they don’t understand the meaning of themselves, or are using incorrectly.

"So a conversation revolves around a string of modern jargon like: ‘cool, choice, neat, stink’ and so on; as a response to far deeper questions. I would use the analogy of a New Zealand traveller in Russia or China, where there is nothing written in English. Nobody understands a word you are saying, you can’t even find your way back to the hotel. So you use a few words like taxi and you can stumble along, but soon you are completely out of your depth because you cannot articulate your thoughts and needs. The same thing happens in life with anyone who is illiterate - and it is more widespread than is generally acknowledged.

"It would be an interesting change in the law if a judge said: ‘I am sentencing you to four years - and you are not to come out unless you can pass School Cert English.’ So you make rehabilitation part of the sentence. ‘Go to your room and don’t come back downstairs until you can read and write’."

Bestic sees one clear use of workshops as a place where inmates learn and attain required Unit Standards in English, bus driving, carpentry, computers and other occupational skills, as an integral part of their rehabilitation. They do not get out until they have achieved the necessary level of Unit Standards.

The problem is that people have be released at a certain time and there are not sufficient directives to force people into doing the workstudy. Where inmates take part in the cooking and kitchen tasks, some show a real aptitude and learn the discipline of everyday working life. Some become good sawmill operators and fork lift drivers.

Asked about the statistics revealing a high rate of criminal re-offending, Bestic says that it’s all fairly relative, there are so many variables. For some unknown reason, New Zealand is always compared with re-offending rates in Finland and Sweden, countries with which we have little in common.

It is the same with corporal punishment as a deterrent, long used by Singapore, Malaysia, China, India and Saudi Arabia. The problem is that criminologists are not carrying out research into those countries to see whether flogging or the strokes of the rotan cane, act as a deterrent to further offending.

"I can tell you one personal anecdote about the rotan cane. When I was CO of the Battalion in Singapore, we had four soldiers caught selling marijuana in the barracks. At my insistence, they were tried through the Singapore court system and received one year in jail, plus ten strokes of the rotan cane.