Corrections

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.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

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.

The Human Rights Commission is becoming a joke. David Fisher writes in the Herald on Sunday about a bizarre case of a crim’s missus wanting to be a Corrections worker in the same prison as her husband is jailed and somehow when she doesn’t get the job it is a breach of her Human Rights.

A woman has been given the go-ahead to sue the corrections department for refusing to employ her as a guard in the prison in which her husband was remanded.

Lydia Butcher wanted to work at the Northland Region Corrections Facility, a prison at Ngawha Springs near Kaikohe.

But her husband of 12 years, 38-year-old Carl Butcher, was sent there on remand for firearms and assault charges. When Department of Corrections bosses found out, they refused to hire her, saying she should have told them.

The case is headed for the Human Rights Review Tribunal after mediation over the issue failed. Robert Hesketh, the Director of Human Rights Proceedings, said the case was going ahead. “We are her lawyers,” he added.

So it is worse, she neglected to tell Corrections on her job application that her husband was banged up. I note that we have comment from one Robert Hesketh. I thought that name was familiar so took a little wander through Google. oh right, it’s that Robert Hesketh, the convicted fraudster ex-Judge.

In January 1997 Judge Robert Hesketh appeared before a district court, and pleaded guilty to eight charges of fraud. The charges related to $815 worth of false accommodation and travel expense claims while employed as a judge in the Whangarei District Court. Hesketh repaid the money before being fined $8,000 and ordered to pay $2,000 costs.

Right, so we now have a convicted fraudster serving on the Human Rights Tribunal taking a case on behalf of a woman whose husband is a convicted armed offender, all because she didn’t get a job at the same prison as her husband.

It is understood the foundation of the case against the department is that Lydia Butcher should not be discriminated against because of her husband’s criminal behaviour.

What next? The only thing that could make this more farcical is if she has convictions that haven’t been disclosed as well.

It is joke cases like this that makes people wonder if we shouldn’t just disband the Human Rights Commission forthwith.

Dean Wickliffe is having a sook and a whinge about the crap food he got in the pokey when he served time for murder.

Corrections Minister Judith Collins has a message for the long-term prisoner who is demanding healthier menus: “stay out of jail if you don’t like the food”.

Dean Wickliffe, one of New Zealand’s longest-serving inmates, wrote to Corrections boss Ray Smith asking for greater variety of more affordable and healthy food for purchase in prisons.

But Collins said: ”If he was so worried about the food in prison, he had choices in his life.

”One of them was to not commit crime to end up in prison for long stretches. Hopefully before committing any other crimes, he would like to remember the food he found so boring and tasteless.”

Dean Wickliffe has forgotten that he was in prison for a long time not a good time. Wickliffe should be thankful he spent time here and not in the US where they have Nutraloaf.

There are many different recipes which include a range of food, from vegetables, fruit, meat, and bread or other grains. Some versions may be vegetarian or completely vegan. The ingredients are blended and baked into a solid loaf form. In some institutions it has no fixed recipe but is simply the regular prison meal (including drink) blended together. In one common version, it is made from a mixture of wheat bread, non-dairy cheese, various vegetables, and mixed with vegetable oil, tomato paste, powdered milk and dehydrated potato flakes. Prisoners do not need utensils to eat it, and it is generally served on a piece of paper, rather than a tray.

In fact I just bet that Judith Collins will now ask Corrections to implement Nutraloaf nationwide at all prisons. It has been tested legally of course:

In April 2010, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County Arizona won a federal judgment for the constitutionality of nutraloaf.

Judith Collins released some great news in parliament today. Contrary to all the wailing and whining from the sooks, pinkos and crim huggers container prisons have been a resounding success.

Good to know that Corrections is planning on building more and multi-story facilities out of them. Apparently the design is so good that Corrections may well be able to licence the designs to overseas prisons.

Respected journalist Phil Kitchin from the Fairfax stable suggested that a contractor holding a non tendered contract with a government department was outrageous.  In fact the way the article was written it was clearly intended to suggest that there was some element of corruption involved.

From the same Fairfax stable, we have Michael Forbes in the business pages today giving the thumbs up to a Whanganui boat building company for negotiating a “syndicated procurement clause” that allows the police and other govt agencies to bypass the tender process and deal direct with said boat building company.

Mr Fothergill also had the good sense to negotiate a syndicated procurement clause in its contract with the police, which allowed other government agencies to bypass the public tender process and go straight to Q-West as a preferred service provider.

This then makes for an interesting conundrum for Fairfax. One well respected writer thinks untendered work is almost corruption and another writer lauds the person responsible for orchestrating non-tendered work as having “good sense”.

So make up your mind Fairfax – corruption or good business? One or the other please.

Watch Bomber go falsetto.