Franks Stephen: Corrections Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Procedure 
Franks Stephen: Corrections Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:617;Page:12984] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party on the Corrections Bill. This bill was introduced more than 2 years ago I believe. Submissions on it closed in May last year but were extended to June. They were all heard in order to allow the committee to report by the end of last year and since then the Minister has sat for nearly 5 months with absolutely no indication to this side of the Chamber or to the people that we would be hit today with 44 pages of fine-print amendment. 
 Why has the Minister decided to amend I think six of the definitions and the crucial principles and purposes statements in an amendment that could have been provided to the Law and Order Committee and could have been considered by the people? Instead he dumped it on the Committee just before we started to debate the bill. What are the reasons? It could be shame. It could well be that it minimises the time the public are exposed to the fact that this is the final nail in the Withers referendum voted for by 92 percent of New Zealand voters. 
Paul Swain thinks that the Withers petition is now back far enough in history that he can scoff at it and bring this bill through. He thinks that the Government has waited long enough that people who are stupid will have forgotten what they petitioned for in 1999. 
There may be another explanation for all these changed definitions for why in clause 5 our New Zealand corrections system is now subjected to United Nations rules and for why clause 6 has a series of silly amendments instead of those that are really needed. For example there should be an amendment to state simply that punishment is one of the purposes of a corrections system that denunciation of crime is one of the purposes of a sentence that prisoners should not be able to gamble on the rewards of crime exceeding the likely punishment cost to them and that obviously prisoners should be kept safe and provided with adequate food shelter and sanitation but that prison is a place is for punishment. 
My amendment in Supplementary Order Paper 208 would omit most of the Minister’s principles and replace them with five simple principles that would record that prison is supposed to be unpleasant. Prison is supposed to be a place that no one wants to go back to. Prison is not supposed to be a place of comfort or of all the statutory assurances of rights to protest and interfere to bring lawyers in and to tangle up prison officers. It is supposed to be a place where prisoners cannot be bullied or assaulted but where otherwise authority rules. It is a place where prisoners learn that the community is not a mug and that it cannot be tossed around by offenders who have learnt outside that rules are for other people. Prison is a place where rehabilitation is a proper objective but is subordinate to the other purposes of imprisonment. There is nothing in this bill to make it plain that rehabilitation is worthy but that no prison system in the world has managed to establish that rehabilitation can be successfully achieved. 
Rehabilitation is spontaneous. No one knows how to reproduce programmes that reliably rehabilitate. So to write an entire Act around the notion that rehabilitation is the primary outcome of imprisonment is simply madness. The amendments that I propose in Supplementary Order Paper 208 would protect the proper interests that prisoners can legitimately claim—that they will not be assaulted that guards will not abuse their lawful authority that prisoners will be kept safe and provided with adequate food—but show that prison is a place for punishment. There is nothing in this bill that records that prison is a place for punishment. Instead we have a new reference to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Those are 40 years old. Those rules state that going to prison is the punishment and that prison is not allowed to punish further.