Davis KelvinKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): Tēnā koe e Te Heamana ngā mihi kau atu ki a koe i tēnei Wiki o Te Reo Māori.[Greetings to you Mr Chairman; compliments to you indeed in this Māori Language Week.]Corrections is the shadow portfolio that I hold and I have to say that it is the portfolio that just keeps on giving. I think that the National Government has actually come up with another plan to solve the homelessness issue and that is just to keep locking people up in prison. Despite the decline in the crime rate over the last 20 years—until very recently because I have to say I hear that burglaries have gone up 11 percent. I believe that if a person was to be burgled they would have less than a 10 percent chance of that burglary being solved. Any burglar who wants to go out and burgle someone's house has got very good odds—there is a 90 percent chance of getting away with it scot-free. But despite the decline in crime until recently the prison population has escalated and it is due to hit 10000 in the next 12 months or so. One of the reasons that prisons are filling up I believe is the poor quality of rehabilitation programmes. I have asked a series of questions of the Minister of Corrections around the rehabilitation quotients that are in the annual plan. The annual plan has got a whole heap of statistics—it will name a programme and it will say that it has got a rehabilitation quotient of minus 9.2. Another one has got a rehabilitation quotient of minus 2.2; another one minus 5.2. People do not really bother to delve down into what those rehabilitation quotients mean but let me tell you about this one in particular. It is a special treatment unit programme and 319 offenders took part in it. That was compared with 319 in a control group that did not take part in it. The cost of this particular course was $5.1 million. The difference in the reimprisonment rate between the group that did the course and the group that did not do the course was just two people—two people at a cost of $5.1 million. Another programme had a rehabilitation quotient of minus 5.2 and 6359 people participated in this particular programme. The results were compared with another 6359 people. The cost of this programme was $15 million. The difference between the two groups was just 19 people. So for every person who did the course and was bettered it is almost a million dollars per success. That is one of the reasons our prisons are filling up—our rehabilitation programmes are not working. Even the annual report of the Department of Corrections says that its programmes are producing results that are less than statistically significant although it does say that there is some positive result. That is true because you need the results to be that only one person is bettered and there is a net positive result. If the results of the control group and the group of prisoners who did the programme were exactly the same it would be a neutral result. Of course if there were more people being reimprisoned after doing the course than in the control group that did not do the course then of course it would be a negative result. In the first instance I described—two people bettered—I guess it can say that that is a positive result. The bracelet saga is another gift that just keeps on giving. The Minister has said that these sturdy new bracelets which the department is buying a thousand or so of are almost indestructible. The prisoner has a choice of either walking around with a leg or no leg—that is the tough talk of the Minister of Corrections. Then we see on television Billy Weepu—that mighty centre for the parliamentary golden oldies rugby team and cameraman for Newshub—come out with a pair of blunt scissors and cut the thing into pieces in a matter of seconds. That snip snip snip" to me is the sound of the Minister's credibility being cut to shreds. But then after the Billy Weepu incident the department decided: "Oh heck we'd better actually test these things." So it rounded up—a very scientific test this was—a group of prison officers. Apparently they were quite big. It took them into a room and it filmed them cutting these things off with a pair of scissors. One prison officer did it in 57 seconds. How is that for a great result?"