Financial Review Debate — Department of Corrections

Of all the financial reviews that the Committee will listen to over this 4-hour debate, the year in review for the Department of Corrections is the worst. There is no doubt that the Department of Corrections has had probably, aside from the Ministry of Health, the worst 12 months in review of any Government department or ministry. In fact, a recent poll in the New Zealand Herald indicated that, aside from health, law and order and corrections issues were at the top of people’s minds throughout New Zealand. So poor has the reputation of this department become over the last 12 months that currently around Wellington there is a yarn that if a graduate joins the Department of Corrections as a policy analyst, he or she will be issued with an executive assistant, a BlackBerry, and a manager to give the blame to if something goes wrong.

In the last year in review, this department has dealt with a $130 million overspend on two of its prisons, issues relating to contraband getting in and out of its prisons at an alarming rate, and allegations of corruption at two of its prisons. At one prison in particular, Rimutaka Prison, two officials were today suspended, which reminds the Committee that those matters were initially denied by the Department of Corrections. It was not until the Minister stepped in that some of those issues were even looked at. The department has dealt with issues relating to cellphone use in prisons, LCD televisions, millions of dollars in costs to landscape new prisons, inmates allegedly fathering children from inside correctional facilities, a lack of drug and alcohol rehabilitation courses, a lack of close monitoring, and the replacement of rehabilitation courses after it was found in the last financial review that inmates who undertook those courses were more likely to reoffend than if they had not undertaken them in the first place.

We have had some positives. In particular, I have been watching with great interest the implementation of new drug rehabilitation courses and centres within our prisons. The Minister knows I have an interest in those matters, and I acknowledge that as a positive step forward for the department. I struggle with the terminology the department uses, such as “drug-free units”. My impression was that the whole of a jail should be drug-free.

In the year under review we have seen the tragic death of young Liam Ashley. The failure, systemically, by the department to get basic things right, such as separating out youths—under-18-year-olds—from dangerous prisoners, had tragic consequences. We have seen that case bore into the heart of some serious systemic incompetence in this department in the year in review. Of course, in the most recent days, as part of that continued systemic failure from the year in review, we have dealt with the tragedy of the killing by Mr Graeme Burton of an innocent person, Karl Kuchenbecker, in the hills outside of Wainuiōmata. At this time, in the second week of March, the department has already provided New Zealand with the quote of the year. At a press conference the department’s chief executive claimed: “there’s no blood on my hands.”

This department is in such trouble that in recent months the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and front the public handling of more than one issue over the period in review. The Prime Minister has seen fit to seek separate legal opinions from the Law Commission about whether the Parole Board, the probation service, and the Department of Corrections acted correctly. This clearly indicates that she has no confidence in this Minister or this department to deliver the outputs they are required to deliver as a department or a ministry or, frankly, to deliver her as the Prime Minister of this country the advice she needs in order to be able to answer the tough questions when more things go wrong—so much so that she simply bypasses this department now and seeks advice directly from the Law Commission.

It is also staggering to us on the Opposition side of the House that amongst all this chaos—this litany of things that go wrong in this department, which just seems to lurch from crisis to crisis—the department continues to deny that these problems exist. On one or two occasions the Minister himself has had to disagree publicly with the chief executive in order to move investigations into matters that the department itself did not want to be further investigated. More particularly, leading into the Prime Minister’s statement at the start of this year, the chief executive officer of the Department of Corrections told the New Zealand public that he was not aware of any changes to parole. Of course, the Prime Minister then announced those changes in her statement to the House on 13 February.

Against all of this background, the Government still has the nerve to be opposed to the private management of prisons. I will step back from the catastrophe of how the inept senior management of this department have been paid several million dollars in bonuses while these particular events have been occurring. Surely, the question on everybody’s mind would be whether the private management of our prisons could do any worse. Could the private sector get it any more wrong than the public sector has? Would it be capable of producing a list of incompetencies as lengthy as the one I have just recited to the Committee? There is not one single person in this Chamber who believes that somebody else running our prisons could not do a better job. In fact, the Minister knows—as I know the previous Minister, Paul Swain, knew—that the Auckland Central Remand Prison, which was privately managed, did a fantastic job. It was so good, in fact, that the then head of the Department of Corrections sent to the incoming Minister a document that stated: “We have a lot to learn from the way the private sector provides management skills in our prisons.”

In that regard, I look forward to my member’s bill being drawn from the ballot during this coming financial review. I look forward to the House supporting the progress of that bill, because, frankly, the year in review for the Department of Corrections could not have been any worse. The capability of the senior management of the department could not have been sloppier. Against that background, these people are still paying themselves bonuses and continuing to live in a culture, which has grown in this department, that continues to deny that things go wrong. This is in stark contrast, as I have said publicly, to the approach adopted by the chairperson of the Parole Board, who at least had the good sense to come out publicly and take some responsibility for the shambles that has occurred over the last few weeks.

This department will not get better in this coming year unless the Minister steps down or, at the very least, has the courage to deal to the senior management of this department who continue to run it, and are guided only by a culture of denial that things are going wrong. Time is running out for the public to be convinced that this Minister or this department are capable of doing anything that could go right. Frankly, there are no surprises when things continue to go wrong.

The year 2004-05 certainly was not a good year for the Department of Corrections. It was, as my colleague has said, a year of budget blowouts, corruption, parole disasters, rehabilitation failures—you name it, the department has had it. Yet, remarkably, the department’s hands are clean, and not a smidgen of blame will the department accept.

We have heard that the State Services Commission report into cost escalation stated there were “a number of areas where the department failed to meet acceptable standards.” That is not satisfactory and that is not good; that is a failure.

This year we learnt about collaborative working arrangements. These are strange contractual beasts, whereby contractors do not submit fixed price quotes, and there is no control on cost escalation. The taxpayer pays the price, and the taxpayer takes the risk. There is absolutely no incentive to complete the project within budget, because there is no budget. These collaborative working arrangements are totally open-ended, commercially stupid, and unacceptable. Even Treasury expressed unease about these collaborative working arrangements. The States Services Commission itself warned that “it appeared that the benefits of the arrangement were emphasised to a much greater extent than the potential risks and costs.” So what happened? The obvious happened. The cost of constructing these four new prisons escalated to $890 million—an additional $490 million, which was nearly twice as much again.

To make matters worse, if one thinks they can be worse—they do get worse—the person responsible for introducing these collaborative working arrangements was paid $1.3 million. Consultants employed to bring efficiency to the construction project cost $455,000 in the first 5 months alone. When we have a blowout of $490 million, I would have thought that the person responsible for introducing that blowout should not be paid $1.3 million, and that consultants employed to bring efficiency who have obviously failed should not have cost the project an additional $455,000. This has not been the year of accountability for the Department of Corrections.

Contraband has increased. Those completing rehabilitation courses are more likely to reoffend than those who did not attend those courses. More prisoners are offending while on community work schemes. There are more lawsuits from prisoners, and they are claiming $8.6 million for some maltreatment. There are 43 grievance claims by staff so far, but, on the other side, $2 million was paid in staff bonuses. There was $31 million spent on consultants. There are fewer prisoners on drug rehabilitation programmes and fewer prisoners working. There is five times more methamphetamine in prisons. And the list goes on and on.

Hard on the heels of the Liam Ashley tragedy we have another tragedy, Graeme Burton. He was released on parole under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. The core business of the department, remember, includes the management of parole, and the department failed. Graeme Burton committed heinous offences whilst on parole. He breached parole, yet the department’s chief executive officer said: “We have complied with all our procedures in terms of the management of his probation.”, then said insensitively, as we have heard, that there was no blood on his hands. He said he acted within the required 7 days. But something went wrong, something went horribly wrong, and somebody must be responsible. During, and as a result of, that inaction—that denial of responsibility, that lack of acceptance of any accountability—an innocent man was murdered, a family was robbed of its father and husband, and other innocent persons were hurt.

The worst of it all is that this tragedy could and should have been averted. The next worst of it all is that lessons could at least have been learnt from this tragedy, but not whilst there is such a state of denial—the “It’s not my fault.” mentality. I ask the Minister of Corrections to take some responsibility, be accountable, and do something to halt the trend of tragedies.

Youth crime is growing in intensity. Violent crimes committed by offenders under the age of 16 have increased by 27 percent since 1999, and sex crimes committed by young people are up by 46 percent. This is during the tenure of a Government that promised that it would crack down on youth crime. Labour put that promise on its pledge card in 1999 and again in 2002. So one has to turn one’s mind towards wondering just how much this Government really cares about the risk factors for youth offending.

The Government set up a high-powered Minister’s group on youth offending. Who was on that? The members were the Minister for Social Development and Employment, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Corrections, the Minister of Police, and the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment (CYF). Given the concern about youth offending and the pledges Labour members made in 1999 and 2002 they would get really stuck into it, let us look at whether a lot of innovation was put before the public. Let us see whether some real good was done. How often do the Ministers meet? Once a week? Once a month? That would have been pretty good; one would expect them to have come up with something. No, they did not meet for 3 years. That gives one an indication of just how much the Labour Government cares about youth crime.

💬 Chris Auchinvole: 3 years?

For 3 years there was not one meeting.

What about the programme to provide health and education assessments for young people who are attending family group conferences? Those are the young people who may well go on to find themselves in youth justice residences, so surely we would want to know what is going on inside their heads and inside their bodies. We know that 83 percent of all prisoners are addicted to some substance or another, usually alcohol or a drug of some kind, but frequently, and especially among young people, to glue and the rest of those sorts of substances, which wind them up and make them do crazy things. But no, we have not implemented anything to find out exactly what is going on inside our young people’s heads or inside their bodies. At the same time, we check them into cells and keep them there because the Labour Government does not care enough about them to do that. One of Labour’s key youth crime prevention programmes was a reducing youth offending programme. It has failed to reduce offending and reoffending at all during the tenure of this Government; in 3 years it has had $12 million to spend, to achieve nothing.

What we do know about the young people who end up going to jail is that the biggest single thing that can prevent them from going to jail is engagement in school. The common denominator of people who find themselves in jail is truancy—frequent, abject truancy. So the Labour Government made a promise that it would set up a national student database to combat truancy, to find out who was in school and who was not in school, to hold their parents and caregivers to account, and to make some prosecutions. In my electorate we have a school called Waverley High School, and it is undergoing some chronic pressures at the moment. It has been stated that up to half the students were absent on any one day. That is contested by a number of teachers and pupils, but we do know that truancy was at an all-time high and was a huge problem for local people in Waverley. How many, then, were referred to the district truancy service? Well, it does not appear that any of them have been referred. Apparently there was a register, or a bit of one from time to time, but no one cared enough to make any referrals at all.

One would expect the police to know who was on the street—young people out offending; real candidates for a life behind bars in jail. Let us see what they are doing; the Minister of Police is part of the high-powered Minister’s group on youth offending. Well, the police do not keep statistics on the number of truancy operations that they run. No doubt they would argue, probably quite rightly, that they are busy enough. But addressing truancy is a key plank in Labour’s policy towards reducing crime with young people. The police cannot tell us how often they have gone looking for truants or how many operations they have run to try to find them. If we look at the police national youth policing plan for 2005-06, we find truancy is mentioned once, and then only in a diagram that lists risk factors for youth.

This Labour Government has an appalling record on youth crime. Although youth crime is remaining relatively static, we do know that youth violent crime has grown exponentially under this Government, and there appears to be little that is happening to combat that. We are seeing huge concern about some areas to do with youth and children. For instance, with the vote that is before Parliament today, we have seen a whipped Labour Party voting to outlaw the smacking of children, yet we have young people who are running foul of the law being uncontrolled in our communities, and causing older people to be frightened in their homes. Those young people are behind home invasions in my electorate, shootings, and those sorts of things going on around the country. There is more youth homicide than we have ever seen before, and the Government is letting the country down badly in respect of youth offending.

Labour has had 8 years to deal with youth crime after putting it on its pledge cards, and nothing has happened. The youth prisons that have been built are costing $1 million a bed to construct, and about $300,000 a year per bed to maintain. There is no real strategy to keep youth out of those facilities, and it is just very unfortunate that after making the big promises, the Government is not following through with policies that will keep those young people away from a life of crime and safe at home.

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and to clarify a few facts that have been thrown into the Committee by the Opposition. I was interested to get a clear indication from Simon Power that the National Party policy, of course, will be to privatise the prisons in this country. I guess that follows on from its policies in the 1990s of privatising the railways, attempting to privatise health, and, of course, housing, in the naive belief that that was going to deliver better services to New Zealand.

I would just like to run through a few basic facts around the Department of Corrections because I think there is, from time to time, a misunderstanding, and perhaps a lack of appreciation, of the challenge that the department has. The prison muster, or the number of people in prisons, is currently over 7,700. It is not a figure that we should be proud of, but it is a reality that we have to manage on a day-to-day basis. We manage on a daily average over 26,000 non-custodial sentences. We have a staff of over 5,800, and we had an operating budget last year of $658 million compared with the last time the National Party was responsible—and I am sure it will not be for a long time yet—when there was a budget of $322 million. That is a huge investment in this area, and one that this Government has taken full responsibility for.

With such a huge responsibility and in such a difficult area of social responsibility no one could say that the system is perfect. No one could say that the system does not need improvements in some areas. As Minister, I think it is important, though, to keep things in balance. Yes, there were budget blowouts in the completion of four prisons on time, built in one of the hottest building climates that this country has had for a long, long time. In fact, the State Services Commissioner, in his report on the prison build situation, stated that the fact that new facilities had been and will be completed on time was impressive. That is not to say that new projects will not have a greater level of scrutiny; we do learn from mistakes that have been made, we acknowledge them, and we move on.

Simon Power referred to contraband issues within prisons. Yes, we acknowledge those issues. They are part and parcel of the international challenge of running prisons. However, compared with 1997 when over 28 percent of prisoners were identified as drug users within prisons, we now have reduced that number back to 13 percent last year. That is a huge improvement in a key operation in the corrections system—that is, trying to keep contraband out of our prisons.

We have from time to time, with such a large number of staff, individuals who will not abide by our protocols, procedures, or, indeed, the law. We will identify—as we have done today—individuals who have not upheld the law within the prison system and we will deal with those issues. That does not mean to say there is widespread corruption or widespread abuse of procedures. We have to acknowledge the fact that, for the most part, corrections staff, in a very difficult environment, carry out a very good job in protecting New Zealanders from some very dangerous individuals. There will be from time to time, as we have unfortunately seen, some mistakes. As I say, we have a responsibility to move on and to deal with those.

I will not labour the issue here other than to say that we will be moving ahead in the next year in some key areas. We are employing another 200 probation officers on top of the over 600 we have at the moment to manage 68,000 sentences, on average, that we manage in the community. Sixty-eight thousand is not a small number and, even with the full complement of the 600-plus to 800 probation officers, they have a challenging task that, I have to acknowledge, they do in a reasonably efficient and generally very safe way.

I will just go over a few other key achievements in areas that we will be focusing on. We were focusing on these areas in the Department of Corrections last year and we will continue to do so. We have been expanding the alcohol and drug units within the prisons. We had two, we opened one last year, and we have committed to another three. This will provide 500 places for intensive drug and alcohol treatment within the prison system. That, we believe, will play a large part in trying to reduce reoffending over time. We have established specialist crime intelligence units within the prisons to gather information that might lead us to a planned escape, as happened at Mount Eden Prison. That planned escape was thwarted because of intelligence gathered within the prison system, and I applaud the success of that unit, even though it has just been established.

We have appointed a new investigation team to act immediately and to investigate any claims of inappropriate behaviour or corruption within the prison system. That investigation team will answer directly to the chief executive, and I think it should reassure the public that if any accusation or claims are made, we will move swiftly to clarify the situation. It is, of course, an environment where accusations can be made easily, and it is important that we get to the truth of these accusations, rather than be chasing around on wild-goose chases because some prisoner or prison officer has made some inappropriate allegation. That can happen.

The member Simon Power referred to rehabilitation programmes. We have, in fact, revamped rehabilitation programmes and we are starting new rehabilitation programmes where it was identified that they were failing in their objective—that is, to reduce reoffending and recidivism. We stopped those programmes the minute we found out that they were not working. We have revamped them and we are re-implementing them, and we believe that they will do a very good job.

We have appointed specialist reintegration teams, made up of case workers who work directly with prisoners before they leave prison. So when prisoners go outside the wire—maybe on to probation, on to parole under the probation service, or on to other community sentences—we have people who are able to assist them with housing, with relationship management, and with making sure they get a bank account. This will enable them to reintegrate back into their families and into society. There are reintegration teams at every prison and they are starting to work very, very well.

Another area where there was some criticism of the department was where it was claimed that we did not have enough work opportunities or provide enough work for prisoners. We have moved to having a target of 60 percent of all prisoners being actively involved in work or training. We are moving up from our current 40 percent and through last year we have made significant improvements in that area. We now have 100 prisoners out on release to work—that is, they go out to jobs and come back every day. All these initiatives help prisoners to reintegrate back into society and reduce the chances of their reoffending.

Really, in conclusion, I do not accept the claim that the corrections system is failing. It has areas where we need to make changes and areas where we need to improve our performance—there is no doubt about that. But it is still doing a very good job in a very difficult environment, managing over 7,700 prisoners inside prison and over 68,000 community sentences every year. That is a big challenge and I think, on balance, the department does a reasonable job. I look forward to making further improvements and making the changes that are necessary as we move forward into the next year.

I was pleased to see that the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections, in his foreword to the 2005-06 annual report, committed to “protecting the public” and “reducing offending”. That is what New Zealanders expect of the Department of Corrections, and they expect the department to do it well. Seeing that the chief executive, Barry Matthews, chose not to sign his foreword or caption his photograph, I wondered whether his recent publicity had made him infamous—so we all knew who he was—or whether he did not want to be associated with the report. He said there was no blood on his hands.

As the National Party spokesperson on youth, I am particularly interested in the prison experience for young people. After all, young people are the most vulnerable of our prisoners and are the ones who would benefit most from support, mentoring, and effective education and training. They are the biggest threat to our society and are those who have the most to lose. I was particularly interested in the recidivism index for young people—those aged below 20 years. In each category—12 months after being released and 24 months after being released—those aged under 20 years had the worst results. After 12 months, 46 percent were re-imprisoned and 65 percent were reconvicted. What is even worse is that after 24 months a staggering 60 percent of young people were re-imprisoned and 82.4 percent were reconvicted. These figures were marginally worse than in 2004-05.

With this in mind I combed the report for initiatives and programmes that could help to reduce reoffending by young people. Obviously, a safe environment, keeping healthy, and good training programmes are essential basics. In terms of a safe environment, managing the prison population has been identified as a real problem. At times during the period under review the occupancy rate peaked at well over 100 percent. As we have heard, the construction of new capacity and the commissioning of new facilities has been fraught with cost overruns and delays, which have been well discussed in this Chamber. But my particular concern with this sort of overcrowding is just how safe the environment is that the Department of Corrections is providing for our young people.

In terms of keeping healthy, I am concerned about the level of drug taking in our prisons. Internationally the level of drug taking is on the high side; it is double that of Australia. As young people have the highest recidivism rates and are normally those most interested in taking risks, I surmise—because the statistics are not broken down by age—that they too have a higher level of drug taking. Of course, young minds and bodies are particularly vulnerable to drugs. This is an area that needs real work.

My colleague Chester Borrows has spoken of the Reducing Youth Offending Programme—and spoken of it as a failure. The Minister has mentioned it, too. The programme has been terminated, which is probably a good decision. I was very surprised to read: “new young offenders were held on a waiting list while changes in referral criteria and treatment priorities were determined.” That was for the first two quarters of the year. The programme will not be available in 2006-07. I do not know how members feel about that, but there will be few New Zealanders who consider it a satisfactory arrangement. Having young people in prison and on a waiting list before they can get help for their problems seems bizarre. Of course, the reoffending gets worse.

I was also concerned to see the percentage of prisoners whose sentencing plans were not in place, due to muster pressures and a reduction in numbers of sentencing planners. Although the performance standard was 100 percent in 2005-06, the rates varied between 75 and 92 percent. I worry about kids who are on a waiting list for a counselling programme and who have no sentencing plan.

Finally, in terms of education and training, in an ideal world, prison could provide the educational opportunities that so many of our young offenders have missed out on. Of course, we all know that the majority of offenders have low literacy and numeracy levels, and a good education programme could make a real difference and give the kids a better future.

In conclusion, this report indicates that the Department of Corrections is not doing a great job for young people in prison.

Report noted.

Department of Building and Housing