Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill
Hon Dr Pita Sharples, Associate Minister of Corrections
Wednesday 25 November 2009

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. I would like to take a call on this bill to make it very clear that I am the Associate Minister of Corrections. I asked for the portfolio because I have spent a lot of my time since the 1970s working in prisons in New Zealand and Australia, and I thought that maybe I could offer something to the prison service by being involved in that capacity as a Minister.

There are good prisons and bad prisons in terms of their administration and the treatment of the service and the duties they perform. I have found good prisons in a private and public capacity, and poor prisons in the same. I favour the introduction of private prisons in the sense that it can give an opportunity for Māori to be more involved in looking after their own and perhaps rehabilitating them.

The role of a prison in the first place is really to incarcerate people and to make the public safe. I believe that it can be extended to rehabilitation, but it needs a particular programme and culture within it in order to perform those tasks.

A variety of Māori programmes have been introduced in prisons for ages. Mention has been made of the Māori focus units. The first one was in Hastings, and I was one of the three people who designed that prison. It did not perform how we wanted it to, and that is what I wanted to talk about. In New Zealand we have more people in prison, and more prisons than we should have for our population. As a result of that the prisons are finding it difficult to cope, so they are putting conditions on each other.

There is a lot of interaction between prisons, which stops the units from running in their own right as a single prison. What we have in the Māori focus units, for example, is that suddenly no more beds are left in the matua prison—in the senior prison—so they put people into the Māori focus unit who do not want to be there, who sometimes are not Māori, and who do not fit into that programme. So it erodes the value of the programme that is operating. There are other factors, too, but unless a programme is set up and is protected so that it can run in accord with why it has been set up, then it is very difficult to carry on.

My own preference is that we build more rehabilitation centres. We have designed some that we are hoping to launch next year. The value of the rehabilitation centres is that they will bring the recidivism rate down, which means it doubles the amount of beds. So if there is a rehabilitation centre with 60 beds and we manage to keep most of those people out of prison, that means that 60 beds are available in the main prison as well as in that prison because those people are not coming back.

It is good to try. I think we have tried quite a few things in prison, and it has been very difficult to maintain them.

I think that it is up to the manager. The member is right about Dom Karauria and the good job that he did at the Auckland Central Remand Prison, but that came down to the manager and the freedom that he had to operate. He saw our P programme and he saw that P was a problem in his prison. He gave $13,000 towards our P programme and he asked us to come into his prison and present to all of his staff. He made his entire staff, except those few who were holding the keys at that moment, observe the programme. At the end of it, he stood up in front of them and said that he did not want to see any of them involved in P trafficking or helping to get P.

He mentioned a guy who had left the week before, who was sacked because he was involved in P, and he said that he did not want to see it happening there. So I was pretty impressed with the prison that he ran. He also had a cultural arm there, and Peter White ran that. He had elders in there by the dozen, and those elders were able to interact I am not saying that this cannot happen in a general prison, but it is harder in New Zealand, because of all the layers of culture that have happened in our prisons.

During my first three years in Parliament, sitting on that bench over there, I noticed that there were quite a few Ministers of Corrections passing through at the time. Corrections was regarded as the portfolio from hell. That was the kōrero.

But, you see, it need not be like that if we are able to effect some change and some difference there. Most of the people working in prisons are well motivated, and I mean that, having worked in there since 1972.

Also, most of the inmates started on little offences, like sleeping in a truck bay in town, or smashing a bus seat or something like that, and it just built up to a welfare home, then into a low-security prison, and then medium and then maximum.

I did visit some private prisons in Australia. I thought that they were pretty good, because they had a sort of case management system, where every inmate had a personal case manager and every staff member had a number of inmates for whom he or she was responsible. That case management thing gave people an opportunity to aspire to privileges. They had a privilege system there. The inmates would get more visits, more leave, and stuff like that, depending on their behaviour and how they operated in the prison.

I think that those sorts of things can come in more easily in a private prison than they can in the mainstream prison, because our mainstream prisons are connected to each other. We have to move some people from there. We have a programme of trying to relocate inmates near to the town where they come from, and that causes all sorts of complications as well. I say that there is a case for private prisons. I think, though, that if we do that, then we have to have the public debate.

I think we have to look at things like security, escape, and so on, and we have to make sure that people have had the chance to have that debate. We have to look at the human rights—the rights of inmates to appeal and to have their appeal heard properly. All of these things have to happen if we are to extend into the private capacity. At the end of the day I think we should try it, because the way that we are doing it now is not working, despite really good attempts being made in the Department of Corrections.

ENDS

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