Kawerau is losing a hundred jobs. That is tough to take. But then again Kawerau has been in the thrall of the unions for years…one day all those chickens were going to come home to roost.
There have been endless MSM stories about it, mostly blaming the Government.
Yet this week the Government announced the creation of 1,300 new jobs.
I’ll repeat that. 1,300 new jobs.
Guess how many articles there have been in the MSM about that.
This is the prison in Suva…it doesn’t look very accommodating but the government has wisely obtained some corporate sponsorship for it…The Vodafone Suva Corrections Centre…enjoy your stay:
Corrections have the ultimate hospital pass with the Beast of Blenheim, but they are making the best of it in Whanganui.
It doesn’t help that Michael Laws and some knuckle-draggers are stirring up nastiness and hatred behind the scenes – all with a view to ousting the mayor, and in reality nothing to do with getting the beast out.
So what Corrections should do is call Michael Laws’ bluff.
They should say:
“OK, you don’t want the beast and you hate Corrections. That’s fine. We’ll move him elsewhere.
“And by the way, we’ll also close Whanganui prison and move the three hundred jobs that go with it to another town.”
What a great victory that would be for Whanganui. Oh, wait…
Anne Tolley has annouced that GPS tracking of bad bastards will start soon. I still recon they should put the live tracking details on a website so we can crowdsource their monitoring:
High risk offenders will be fitted with GPS-equipped ankle bracelets so authorities can monitor their movements around the clock, Government has announced.
Corrections Minister Anne Tolley said the ankle bracelets will notify Corrections staff if paroled offenders stray into “exclusion zones” such as parks and schools.
They will be introduced in August, with 11 child sex offenders on parole with special conditions fitted in the initial launch.
Corrections has asked the Parole Board to order high profile rapist Stewart Murray Wilson, known as the “Beast of Blenheim”, to wear a bracelet following his release from jail in September.
“GPS tracking will be a valuable tool for Corrections and will give peace of mind to communities,” Mrs Tolley said.
“We need to stay one step ahead of these people and this proactive approach with more advanced technology allows us to reduce the risks to the public.”
Two prisoners have escaped from state run Waikeria Prison:
Police have named two prisoners who escaped from Waikeria Prison early this morning.
They are Jesse Lee Ibell, 24 and Wayne Holmes, 23.
Police confirmed this afternoon that the two men had indeed left the prison’s grounds, after having confirmed sightings from the public that the men had been seen in the Hauraki Plains are this morning.
General Manager Prison Services Jeanette Burns confirmed two prisoners breached security and escaped from their cell in the early hours of this morning. The prisoners broke out of a unit that will be closed in April next year.
Detective Sergeant Ross Patterson of the Te Awamutu CIB said police were contacted shortly after 2am today about two Waikeria Prison inmates who were unaccounted for.
At first they thought the inmates could still be on the prison grounds. Just the other day the media was full of outrage because a prisoner managed to go missing for 30 minutes from Auckland Remand where Serco runs the prison. This was claimed to be a failure private prison system.
At least there is the possibility for a fine of $150,000 against Serco is they were at fault. WHat sanctions will there be regarding the escapes from Waikeria?
Will Corrections have calls for their axing of management of Waikeria Prison by the media?
If the PSA and Corrections Union claims that an escape is a failure of a private contract then surely a double escape from a state run prison is likewise a failure of the state system.
I find it interesting that Labour is opposed to the closing of old prisons. Surely liberals would want to close down old fashioned incarceration institutions in favour of ones that are better for the inmates?
But no, Charles Chauvel has said Labour wants to keep New Plymouth Prison open:
New Plymouth Prison is the country’s oldest operational prison and accommodates 112 minimum to high-medium security prisoners. The prison also accommodates offenders on remand.
The prison was originally an army hospital in the 1860s during the Taranaki land wars. The site was converted to a prison later that decade and has been in use ever since.
And Mt Crawford:
Wellington Prison was built in 1927 and replaced the original Terrace Gaol in central Wellington.
A third prison hasn’t yet been named but Waikeria is a pretty nasty old style type facility.
Nonetheless the enlightened liberals in the Labour party seem to want to keep these old, draughty, cold prisons open.
The government is closing down the old clunker prisons in the regions when the new prison at Wiri comes on stream:
Prime Minister John Key has confirmed old regional prisons are set to close and be replaced with a new privately-built prison at Wiri, in South Auckland.
The Government announced earlier this month that Serco, the private company managing Auckland’s Mt Eden prison, would also run the new 960-bed jail which would be built by Fletcher Construction.
Although the prison muster has been falling, the Government says it needs extra capacity in Auckland.
Serco is expected reduce reoffending by more than 10 per cent and will face financial penalties if it fails to meet the target.
I love the investive system. Just like when a prisoner escapes, the private operator cops a fine. Now with the private contracts definable and measurable outcomes are being built in to ensure that recidivism is addressed.
It is such a pity that Labour and the prison officers union are opposed to such accountability.
Labour’s justice spokesman Charles Chauvel said Wiri was expected to cost the taxpayer about $1 billion over 25 years but its “indirect” costs were becoming clear and were “disturbing”.
“National seems to have made a decision that, rather than refurbish many regional state-owned institutions, it will simply close them. Prison closures will be a big blow to regional economies. Job losses will be significant.”
The proposal made “little economic or social sense”.
The National-led Government should invest the $1 billion in improving existing state assets instead of boosting the bottom line of a private company, he said.
So when Labour is opposed to the sale of state assets they mean they prefer the state continues to own and operate Victorian era prisons and prisons built in the first third of the last century.
Just the other day Serco, the private operator of the Mt Eden Remand prison was fined $150,000 after a prisoner escaped. On Tuesday a prisoner escaped from a Correction facility in Turangi:
A daring inmate has escaped from his prison in a Department of Corrections 4WD.
Jamie Paamu Hughes, 29, escaped from Rangipo Prison near Turangi about 11.15am this morning, police said.
Hughes escaped in a white 2005 Toyota Landcruiser, registration CPU985, which had a large grey speaker mounted on the roof.
Hughes is a 160cm tall male Maori of thin build. Police said anyone who sees him should not approach him but should contact police.
If private operators get fined for escapes, what is the sanction for when prisoners escape from state run facilities.
I have an idea…fine the CEO of Corrections, the General Manager of the prison and the Corrections Union the $150,000. Split it evenly. Seems fair.
Oh dear, a child sex offender is in threat of a bashing:
The Department of Corrections has caved in and agreed to move a child sex offender out of a south Auckland community after a third public meeting and threats of vigilante action.
Corrections promised 20 Otara residents that a time frame for the man’s relocation would be confirmed by the end of today.
The promise follows a meeting in Otara earlier today where Corrections managers met with a group of worried parents and residents.
Otara Network and Action Committee chair Adele Hamilton says there is concern for the man’s safety after his whereabouts were revealed.
”We need to advise our community that we’re working with the Department of Corrections on having the person removed,” she says.
Auckland Council community advisor Tipi Arthur helped facilitate the meeting and says the community was clear in its demand to have the man removed and it was now waiting for confirmation.
White Island is pretty vacant, I think that would be a suitable place.
Liberal panty-waists like to moan about our prison population and compare us to the US and their incarceration rate. When you confront them with a possible solution they rarely have one or talk about gay solutions like more hugs and cuddles for the poor mis-understood criminal. The liberal panty-waists encouraged over the years by politicians too afraid to grasp the nettle came up with Home Detention….like that was ever going to work.
One guy who knows just a little bit about crime thinks the US should look at bringing back flogging as a way of reducing incarceration. His argument is as much for NZ as it is for the US.
Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore policeman who now serves as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, is disgusted with the nation’s prison system. His novel solution: bring back flogging. He argues that the tactic could help reduce the prison population, the recidivism that jail breeds, and the cost of running the world’s most expensive and least effective prison system.
I can just see the comments that are going fly over this post.
I propose giving a choice for people to receive a flogging in lieu of jail or prison time. My goal is to be more humane. Given the choice between ten lashes and five years in prison, who wouldn’t choose the lash? I know I would. Because flogging would happen only with the consent of the flogged, it would be hard to argue that it’s too cruel to consider. If the choice were so bad, nobody would choose it.
I think one lash for every six months of potential incarceration is a fair deal. Some people say flogging isn’t harsh enough. Others say it may be too soft — though I really hope we haven’t reached the point in our society where whipping is considered too light a punishment.
Really struggling to find an argument against that logic. For years it was the same choice school boys, including myself, faced. Detention or a stroke of the cane? I always took the cane.
The actual flogging would be done as it is in Singapore and Malaysia, where it involves tying a person down, spread-eagled, on a large structure, pulling down his or her pants, and flogging the bare behind with a rattan cane. Make no mistake: it’s painful and bloody. It’s not a gentle spanking. But the process is over in a few minutes. Then a doctor can tend to the wounds and the person can go home.
I think merely presenting the choice helps us question the purpose of prison, and suggests how destructive incarceration is for the individual and society. It’s worse than flogging.
The Singapore/Malaysian style is brutal, but I hazard a guess that the recipient won’t be wanting a repeat. But I am sure people like the Sensible Sentencing Trust would argue that incarceration has led to a decrease in crime.
I agree that some offenders usually need to be locked up — pedophiles, terrorists, serial rapists, murderers — but there aren’t very many of these people. And they need to be incarcerated because we have reason to fear them. For most other crimes, flogging would be better. Arresting a drug dealer, for instance, does not reduce drug use. It simply creates a job opening.
Incarceration can actually increase crime. We know that the children of incarcerated parents — and we’re dealing with well over a million such children — are more likely to become criminals. We also know that people who do time are more likely to commit crimes when they get out, and that 95 percent of prisoners are released. I believe crime has decreased not because of our massive level of incarceration, but despite it.
This gets to the core issue of prisons: they fail at their basic mission of “curing” the criminal. We need to abandon the utopian ideal that prison is good for the soul. What could be a worse environment for rehabilitation than years of confinement surrounded by a bunch of criminals?
Interesting. But can we flog the pedos, rapists and murderers as a supplementary punishment to their incarceration?
We need to give criminals the resources they need to lead non-criminal lives. But giving housing, jobs, education, and health care to ex-convicts is a tough sell, especially when we don’t even give these essentials to non-criminals.
Without rehabilitation — which most prisons don’t even pretend to attempt — we’re left asking the basic question “Why prison?” The answer is always deterrence and punishment. Well, there’s no reason to think flogging would be any less of a deterrent than incarceration. And prisons don’t punish well, at least not relative to the amount we spend on them. Could we not spend the current $30,000 per year per prisoner more productively?
Admittedly there may be other, better ways to punish — methods that involve neither prison nor flogging. I certainly hope so. But as it stands, we’re stuck with prisons because we lack alternatives. Harsh as it may be, flogging is more humane, less destructive, and much cheaper than what we have now.
Home Detention isn’t working, for society, the criminals love it. Prison doesn’t work either, other than the criminals are off the street. Perhaps a return to corporal punishment is warranted.
