Estimates Debate — Vote Corrections

I guess there has not been a worse year than this year for the Department of Corrections. Every time someone gets up and holds the Minister to account for the performance of the department, he keeps going back to the point that the number of escapes has dropped by 73 percent. He then goes on to talk about three escapes, instead of four, or something along those lines. But if we have a close look at the Department of Corrections and where it has been over the past 12 months or so, there has been one little mess after another.

Let us have a look at the Graeme Burton debacle, for instance, which quickly followed the Liam Ashley one. Graeme Burton killed Karl Kuchenbecker and wounded three others. Who was in charge of Graeme Burton at that time? The answer is that it was the Department of Corrections. Burton was on parole, and it was the department’s job to watch over him to ensure that his movements were compliant with his parole conditions. We know that he was released into the community on 10 July on parole, and his exact location was withheld. He set about attending a course. Later on, the police had information from good informants that he was wandering all over the place, and was hitting up lower-order drug dealers, using stand-over tactics—beating them up before robbing them. On one occasion Burton is said to have threatened to shoot all six witnesses to one of these robbings and beatings. We know that that took place on 30 November. He carried on like that.

On 5 December Burton breached his parole, and the Department of Corrections sent him a letter. No one went to look for him. No one told the police. No one followed up. His parole officer went on holiday. More things happened—the sorts of things we would expect him to be pulled up for. The police were worried sick. They were getting information on a frequent basis as to what he was doing—home invasion, standing over other drug dealers, making threats, and gathering arms—but nothing was done. Eventually, as we know, he killed Karl Kuchenbecker on 7 January. What happened then? There was a storm in the media. The Department of Corrections was supposedly held to account, and we had the further debacle of the CEO of the department appearing on television, holding out his hands and saying: “There’s no blood on my hands.”

Last night we had a vein-popping tirade from the Hon Phil Goff. He went on and on about National’s record in corrections. He was the one who made accusations around a project called INCIS, which we all know is a part of history as a failed project. What he did not point out was that this Government appointed “Mr INCIS” as the CEO of the Department of Corrections.

This year the Labour Government, through the Department of Corrections, will spend $311,000 on chartered flights to move prisoners around the country. We have to wonder how it can spend so much money on doing that. The department spent $31 million on consultants in the past 4 years. I know that running up to the 1999 election there was an article in our local paper written by the Labour Party candidate who caned the National Government for having spent $5 million on consultants in the previous year. The Department of Corrections spent $3 million in the first 3 months of this year on consultants. Who would argue that they are any better than they were then? An amount of $2.6 million was wasted on removing the contract for the remand centre in Auckland and putting it back under the Government sector because there was a clash of philosophical extremes on the part of the Labour Party.

The Labour Party, through the Department of Corrections, spends $190 a night on people staying in police cells. Last year 57,000 prisoners—Department of Corrections inmates—stayed in police cells, at a cost of $10.8 million. We have to wonder just where it is going. Jails can have flat-screen TVs and underfloor heating, but when we ask the Department of Corrections about that, it says: “Well, you can’t build old. We’re building these new prisons, and you can’t build old.” Well, actually, the department can build something that is not luxurious. It can tone it down a bit. We have to wonder just how much rope this Government wants, when it can double the amount quoted—from $500 million to $890 million—to build four new prisons, get 500 extra beds, and spend $1 million per bed. If the Government cannot get a prison bed for less than $1 million, it is doing it wrong.

It is hard to know whether that speech justifies any reaction, but on behalf of the over 5,000 people who work in the Department of Corrections I will stand up and explain what we do, because those people end up being the whipping boy too often for too many people in this country. They end up being a mere target for the National Party—a party that has not one policy in the area of corrections. I am sorry; it has two policies. One is to privatise the prison system and the other is to do away with parole. Both those policies are, quite frankly, ridiculous.

The Department of Corrections does a very good job by any international measure, and it does so in a very difficult area. Over the last 7 years we have increased the prison capacity by 2,100 beds. It has cost over a billion dollars. We do not like spending money on prisons in this country, but we came into Government facing a system that had been left to languish and had been run down under the likes of Nick Smith and other Ministers. We grasped the mantle, and we built over 2,100 new cells in this country to address the sad but realistic situation that New Zealand locks up people at the second-highest rate in the Western World. That is something we are not proud of. No one in this country should be proud of that.

Every year the corrections system deals with over 68,000 sentences in the community. Currently, over 8,100 people are in prisons around this country. We are determined, as a Government, to do more than just invest in prisons, as we have had to do—and yes, we do have underfloor heating, because it is the most efficient and safest way to ensure we have minimum standards of heating in our prisons. I make no apologies for that. I make no apologies for building prisons that are of an international standard and will be there for 100 years, conducting what is a necessary but sad part of Government responsibility. [Interruption] Oh yes, Nick Smith is there, desperate to try to justify his management of the corrections system in the past. The only thing the previous National Government did was to attempt to start the privatisation of prisons. Those members initially signed a contract with Chubb. They initially built Auckland Central Remand Prison, which we took back into the public prison system.

Correction is a very difficult area of Government responsibility. We will maintain that responsibility under the wing of the Government. We will not attempt to disengage ourselves from that responsibility, as the National members have said they would do, by privatising prisons. All I would say to those people who think doing that might be better is that they should look offshore. They should look to Australia, the US, and other areas around the world that have attempted to privatise the prison system. It has failed.

What we are doing is moving to improve the system we have within prisons in order to ensure that we have better programmes of rehabilitation, and we have revamped them. We have invested huge amounts in reintegration so that at sentence end those prisoners will be better able to move back into the community and participate in a worthwhile way. Internationally, the sad statistics are that far too many prisoners do reoffend. We are at the forefront of rehabilitation programmes and of initiatives to try to reduce that rate of reoffending.

I stand up for each and every one of those people who work in the corrections system. Some have broken the rules and some have taken short cuts. We have put in place a new intelligence system whereby skilled people within the corrections system gather intelligence and information. They can identify any prison officer or any person employed by the Department of Corrections who is breaking the law or not abiding by the code of conduct and the policies we have laid down. When we identify one of these individuals and that person is stood down or the matter is taken to the police, members of the Opposition stand up and say it is an indication of failure. Well, I have to say that we will be identifying more individuals, and there are only a few who may have been breaking the law or breaking the code of conduct or our policies. We will identify them because we have better systems of intelligence-gathering within the prison system now, and we will be dismissing and prosecuting those people.

Corrections is a difficult environment. Wherever one has 8,000 criminals in any one system, there will no doubt be some problems. We are not running kindergartens here—it is a very difficult area. Every measure against the corrections system—assaults on prisoners themselves, assaults on staff, and escape rates—in international terms, has declined dramatically under this Government and will continue to do so. We have invested a huge amount in better security systems, drug-dog teams, single points of entry, 17 kilometres of perimeter fencing, and on and on it goes, because we are committed to running a properly resourced, effective, and efficient corrections system in this country, and we will continue to do that.

The only alternative we have heard from the National Party, from the bleating of Simon Power and Chester Borrows, is that National would privatise the prison system and all parts of it, and that it would do away with parole. Well, that begs the question—if anyone were to ask anyone intelligent—of how we attempt to reintegrate people back into society when they reach the end of their sentence. Parole is accepted as a key component of any system of corrections, incarceration, rehabilitation, or reintegration—call it what we like. Parole will continue to be part of the system. It must be well managed. We have moved to make changes in that area, as we have whenever we have identified a problem within the corrections system or the justice system.

I look forward to the passage of the Criminal Justice Reform Bill, and to the new community sentences that will be brought into place. They will assist us to reduce over time the number of people who have to be sent to prison and, ultimately, they will reduce the rate of incarceration in this country, which is, quite frankly, a disgrace. This Government will invest in front-end policies like early childhood education, Working for Families, and social support, because we know that ultimately that is the best way to reduce the rate of crime and the rate of incarceration in this country. I applaud the efforts of the people working in the corrections system. I think that they do an outstanding job in the face of very difficult and trying circumstances.

💬 Chester Borrows: Mr Chairman—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): Not on this vote, Mr Borrows. You have two calls on Vote Corrections. [Interruption] No, the member had two calls, albeit he did not use too much of the second one.

I seek leave for Chester Borrows to have a call on Vote Corrections.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): Leave has been sought for that course to be followed. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

The Minister asked the question: “Well, how do you deal with people who are being released back into the community if they’re not on parole?”. The answer to that is: “You deal with them while they are in prison.”

Every person who goes to prison has to come out of it in better nick than when he or she went in. We know that at the moment 8,000 prisoners are inside our prisons. The Minister said that himself, and he confirmed it. There are 44 drug and alcohol beds, and 199 people are waiting for treatment in those beds. But no one is addressing the problem. We know that 83 percent of the 8,000 people in our prisons have drug and alcohol problems. Funnily enough, 83 percent of those people have literacy and numeracy problems, as well. But, you know, people serving a sentence of less than 2 years under this lot over there cannot get any help with those problems—none whatsoever—and that keeps people on a cycle that has them going back to jail, back to jail, back to jail.

In Wanganui, a shoe factory was operating out of Kaitoke prison. It was put there, funnily enough, under the National Government, which, according to Mr O’Connor, cocked up corrections well and truly, in spite of the fact, of course, that Labour has been in Government for 14 of the last 22 years. Apparently, anything that has ever gone wrong in corrections is National’s fault. Anyway, a shoe factory was operating within the Kaitoke prison. The prison took 100 inmates a year, the vast majority of whom had never worked. In 2003 that factory was closed down by Labour because it did not make a profit, but what it did do was to save the taxpayers of New Zealand $5 million a year in unreturned prisoners. Anecdotally, every one of those wardens at the Kaitoke prison who were involved in watching over the shoe factory said that none of the prisoners came back—none of them ever came back.

This Government has spent $11 million on landscaping prisons. That is the big plus it can point to when it talks about what it has done around prisons. But members should look at the situation around the Liam Ashley debacle. Look at what happened there. The parents of this young man, through a tough love arrangement, said that, yes, they would allow him to go into prison overnight, believing he would actually be safe within the care of the Department of Corrections, under this Government. But where did he go? He went to the Auckland remand centre, which had been privatised under National, and which this Government accepted had a better record than any other State-run remand centres. He was put there, at that centre run by the Department of Corrections, and he died because he was locked up in a cage, in a prison van, with a guy who had murdered. He was chained to him and, what do you know, that guy beat the hell out of him. What do we ever hear from corrections about that?

💬 Hon Tau Henare: Damien didn’t even say sorry.

We did not hear that. We were told that the parents were apologised to, but the parents say: “Oh, funny—we don’t remember that; we don’t remember that at all.”

Then, within a few months, we had the debacle around Graeme Burton, which we mentioned earlier on. The fact is that this Government does not know how to “do” corrections. It stuffed up the budget. The sum of $500 million was set aside for four new prisons, and that figure blew out to $890 million for only another 500 beds—a million bucks a bed. What did we find last year? Well, we found that we gave $1.9 million in bonuses to the administrators of the Department of Corrections. And just this year, so far, over $1 million dollars has already been paid out to administrators within the department. The Minister himself has to accept that the department has never been run so badly, because he cannot point to a single year under a National administration when there was stuff-up after stuff-up in corrections.

💬 Hon Damien O'Connor: Of course you can.

Well, I ask the Minister to give us a year. The Minister can give us a year if he wants to, but he can never point to a single year in corrections under our administration when corrections ever performed so badly—not one. I say to him: “The microphone is yours, Minister. Take a call.”

I could sit down here and for the next 10 minutes read off a list of incidents that have happened in corrections under a National Government. I do not think that anyone would pretend that incidents are not part and parcel of corrections life, but we hope to keep them to the minimum, and not to have any tragic consequences as a result of any of them. I acknowledge—and have done so to the families of these victims—that in the case of Liam Ashley, and the Kuchenbeckers through the Burton situation, we have had tragic outcomes from mistakes that were made in the justice system.

I say, though, to go back to a couple of points raised by the previous speaker, that when we came into Government there were two drug and alcohol units, but, yes, they were delivering very few places in the corrections system for people with drug and alcohol problems. At the end of next year we will have six drug and alcohol units operating in this country, and there will be places for 500 inmates. I have opened two new drug and alcohol units myself, and there are two more to be opened. We have committed a huge amount into this area, after years and years of neglect.

The member referred to literacy and numeracy issues, but never has there been more money poured into education in the corrections system than is currently happening. We now have prisoners leaving prison with New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) credits—for many of them it is the first time they have ever achieved anything. I have been very proud to go to those celebrations, where prisoners have broken down in a couple of instances, because they have received acknowledgment of their talents. Each and every one of them has talents, but we cannot turn their lives around overnight. The member says that we should fix up these prisoners while they are in prison. Well, all we can do is offer them opportunities to address their drug and alcohol and literacy problems, and we are doing so.

In terms of employment, less than 40 percent of the prison population were usefully employed when Labour took over. We have set the target, under the Prisoner Employment Strategy, of 60 percent of the prison population being employed or in training. I today visited Tongariro/Rangipō Prison to see the growth in opportunities that we are creating there for prisoners to get NZQA credits, and to try to make something useful of the time they spend in prison, so that when they leave they will be able to move into useful jobs, and, hopefully, not return.

Mr Borrows said—and I would like to check this out, because I think I would certainly issue instructions to start a shoe factory again if what he said were true—that none of those prisoners ever returned to prison. Well, I do not think there would be one programme in the world of which that could be said—unfortunately. It is not that we should not strive for such an outcome, but that member said that no one ever returned. I think that that might be stretching the truth a little bit, I tell Mr Borrows.

We do our best to provide useful employment and training within the prison system. We have moved to get accreditation for that skills training so that people can leave with credits, and I am very proud—as are most of the people in the corrections system—of the progress we have made in these areas of drug and alcohol rehabilitation, of better health services, and of improved opportunities for employment. Once again, I say thank you to the people who work in the corrections system for their commitment and their work in the face of very trying times.

💬 Sandra Goudie: Well, the taxpayer isn’t thanking the Minister for the incredible waste of public money.

But National members, like that member there, just want to harp on and criticise each and every one of them, time and time again, for no good reason.

I stand to take a short call on corrections. We have just heard, not a lot of time ago, from a National speaker, who basically managed to say nothing at all that was positive about our corrections system. All he could manage to do, as a speaker—and as part of the National Party, once again bouncing from cloud to cloud looking for substance—was to bash our corrections system.

In fact, the Department of Corrections is doing a very good job under a very good Minister. The people who work in corrections are doing a very good job. Let us not forget all those people; one of them is my relative in Invercargill. I pay tribute to those staff members in the prison in Invercargill, in my electorate, who are doing a fantastic job in a difficult area. They do not deserve to be knocked by those members opposite. They do not deserve to be knocked, at all, by those members opposite, for nothing but a bit of cheap publicity. They are dedicated staff, each and every one of them; they do a good job. They treat prisoners like people, which seems to be something that is missing from the spirit of Mr Borrow’s speech—people who might actually have a future when they leave prison.

It might be something new for Mr Borrows to reflect on, that many of the prisoners he talked about in the speech he just gave are people who will leave prison and who deserve the ability and the guidance to rehabilitate themselves back into society and lead useful lives. That is what this very good Minister is helping to lead in our corrections system. He is helping to put in place the actual rehabilitation programmes that give some of those people a chance when they leave prison.

It might come as news to the National Party that we do not help put people in prison then throw away the key and feed them on bread and water. Many of those people will come out of prison, and we want them to come out and lead good lives. The fact is that most prisoners will come back into society. If those members opposite have not worked that out yet, then it will be a very sad thing if they ever get their hands on the corrections system again. Those innovative programmes that the current Minister has helped put in place are making a difference and are giving prospects for the future.

And what is the only thing that National has to offer as a solution for corrections? It is privatisation. Well, National tried that when in office, and it failed. If ever it got its hands on the corrections system and tried to privatise it again, then it would fail again, because the policy is without substance. It is another one of the ghostly raft of non-policies, which are all that National is capable of delivering.

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