More people appearing in courts in the region are being sent to jail, figures released this week show.
In 2009, a total of 2785 people were sent to prison after being sentenced in courts in the central region, which includes the top of the South and the lower North Island. Ten were sentenced to life imprisonment.
This was up from 1878 people in 2000, when two people were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The increase is in step with national figures and is prompting calls from a penal reform group to change the focus of the prison system.
Jarrod Gilbert, a spokesman for the Howard League for Penal Reform, said policies surrounding imprisonment were "based on emotion" rather than "sound logic and best evidence".
Mr Gilbert said the cost to house an inmate was about $90,000 per year, which he believed could be better spent on preventative measures.
"The problem is when we envisage people going to prison we think of the [Graeme] Burtons and terrible criminals like that, but the reality is many people are in prison because they have addictions to alcohol and to drugs and to gambling.
"The cost of solving those problems is much much less than putting them in prison."
Mr Gilbert said the rehabilitative focus prisons had could be beneficial for some inmates, however the programmes were not adequately funded.
"There are some excellent things occurring in our prisons, but the funding for those is so limited they're only being undertaken in pockets. The majority of people coming out of prison are worse off than they were before they went in.
"At the end of the day, we don't want more criminals, we want less crime. We want a society that doesn't have these problems, that's the ideal."
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