A new official forecast says New Zealand will be holding far more people in prison within a decade, with the country’s muster projected to climb by more than a third as a wave of tougher sentencing laws works its way through the courts.
The Justice Sector Projections, released on 12 June by the Ministry of Justice alongside the Department of Corrections and other agencies, put the prison population at 15,200 by June 2036. That is a 35 percent rise on the 11,240 people who were behind bars in February this year, and it would take the country past the previous record muster reached in 2018.
The numbers land at an awkward moment for a government that has staked much of its law and order pitch on getting more offenders off the streets while also promising to be careful with public money. Each extra prisoner carries a heavy price. Corrections’ most recent annual report put the cost of holding a single sentenced inmate at 201,408 dollars a year, or about 552 dollars a day, with a remand prisoner costing 414 dollars a day. On those figures, the projected increase of nearly 4,000 prisoners would add hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the corrections bill before a single new wing is built.
The forecast points squarely at recent law changes as the main driver. The Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Act, the Crimes Amendment Bill and the return of the three strikes regime are all expected to push sentences up and keep more people inside for longer. More frontline police and a higher rate of prosecution are feeding more cases into the system as well. The report does not expect a flood of new cases overall. Total court volumes are tipped to fall by about 4 percent, but the cases that do reach court are forecast to be more serious, with a 5 percent rise in the most serious charges.
The sharpest growth is on remand, where people are held before they have been sentenced or, in some cases, before they have been found guilty of anything. Remand prisoners already make up 4,677 of the muster, or 41 percent, and that share is projected to climb to about 6,900, or 45 percent, by 2036. The average time spent on remand is forecast to stretch from 91 days to 110 days. The projected rise for women entering remand is steeper still, at 82 percent.
That remand picture matters because it is the part of the system least connected to a judge’s sentence and most connected to how quickly courts can work through their lists. Delays, adjournments and late guilty pleas all keep people sitting in a cell while their case grinds on, at full cost to the taxpayer and often with little certainty about the outcome.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith made no apology for the trend. “We want to see fewer people in prison but only after we see fewer victims of violent crime,” he said, restating the line the government has used to defend a run of bills that lengthen sentences and narrow the discounts judges can apply. Ministry of Justice sector insights general manager Rebecca Parish struck a more measured note, saying “timely access to justice continues to be a priority, with initiatives helping to stabilise remand times” through programmes aimed at moving cases through the courts faster.
Labour’s corrections spokesperson Dr Tracey McLellan took a different view, warning that simply building toward a bigger muster solves nothing. “The report also shows women’s imprisonment rising sharply and this prison-growth approach will only deepen the existing over-representation of MΔori in our justice system,” she said. Her wider argument is that money poured into beds and guards is money not spent on the things that actually pull reoffending down, such as housing, mental health care, addiction treatment and getting people into work on release.
Both sides of that argument point back to the same underlying mechanism, which is sentencing policy and court speed rather than any sudden surge in offending. A prison muster is not a weather event. It is the sum of decisions Parliament makes about who goes inside, for how long, and how quickly their case is heard. Change those settings and the forecast changes with them, which is why the figures will be fought over rather than simply accepted.
The government has at least started to budget for the bills it is writing. Budget 2025 set aside another 492 million dollars over five years for Corrections, including new beds at Christchurch Men’s Prison, and Budget 2026 lifts spending on the department past 2 billion dollars by 2028. Whether that keeps pace with a muster heading for 15,200 is the open question, and one that will sit at the centre of the corrections debate right through to the 2026 general election.
For voters trying to work out where each party stands on prisons, sentencing and the cost of both, Newswire’s voting tool lays out the main parties’ positions side by side.
What do you make of the forecast? Should the government keep tightening sentences even as the bill climbs, or put more into the things that keep people out of prison in the first place? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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