Chauvel Charles: Corrections Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Corrections Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:618. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 Could I begin by congratulating the new Minister of Corrections on her new portfolio and wishing her well in her tenure in the role. I agree with what she said about the importance of the sector. I was fortunate in my time in legal practice to have some connection with the Department of Corrections representing it from 1994 through to 2006 in various court cases where the legality of actions of the department were challenged in various courts around the country. I had the opportunity to do that both when I was working at the Crown Law Office and in private practice and over that time I got to see the culture changes that were going on in the Department of Corrections from the mid-1990s—in fact when it was still a part of the old Department of Justice—through to only 5 years ago. Those culture changes are encouraging and I think they are ones that it is in the interests of every member of this Parliament to encourage and to support because as the Minister said we do want a system that not only contains people securely where that is required but also and much more importantly for the long term deals effectively with habilitation and rehabilitation. Certainly that is something that I very much want the system to continue to re-gear to do and to achieve that much more quickly than we have been able to see so far.  
The legislation before us the Corrections Amendment Bill is something of a mixed bag and the proof of that is the fact that there are five different regulatory impact statements on the legislation because there have been five different Cabinet papers leading to the legislation that we are considering today. There are some sensible measures in the bill. The provision that will deal for example with the self-employment of prisoners is one that it would be very difficult for anybody to argue with. That should be put on a secure footing. The whole inmate employment scheme has been a success and it is one that again receives support from this side of the House.  
But there are provisions in the legislation that are of concern. The Minister in her speech mentioned the provision of health services in our prisons. She said that there would be some changes made to the way in which those services are provided. Well the problem that Labour members have with the provisions in the bill concerning health services is that they seem to run quite counter to the recommendations of a very recent report of the Office of the Ombudsmen on the provision of health services in prisons. In the  
Investigation of the Department of Corrections in relation to the Provision Access and Availability of Prisoner Health Services 
 the Ombudsmen said that taxpayers would actually get much better value for money if prison health services were delivered by an external health agency under the aegis for example of the local district health board rather than by the Department of Corrections itself. But this legislation puts the responsibility for the provision of health services on to employees of the Department of Corrections rather than on to medical officers—that is in exactly the opposite direction to the move proposed by the Ombudsmen. So Labour members accepting that the Government is likely to have the support needed to send this legislation to a select committee will want to have a look at that provision with particular care and detail at the select committee.  
Another provision that is of concern relates to the restraint of inmates in mechanical restraints. At the moment the law says that a visiting justice has to approve keeping an inmate in restraints for more than 24 hours. That provision would go under this legislation as I read it and there would be a provision allowing a medical officer in the prison to certify that for reasons to prevent self-harm for example an inmate could be kept in mechanical restraints for longer than 24 hours. Again at the select committee I think it will be very important to ensure that there are sufficient safeguards in respect of that provision.  
Back on the issue of medical services in prisons the bill removes the requirement that there be a medical officer appointed to each prison and the replacement provision reads that there should simply be “a sufficient number of medical officers to meet prisoners’ needs for medical care and medical treatment.” I would be concerned if at a smaller prison like New Plymouth for example the effect of that was that a medical officer would not have to be actually resident or based in that location but able to serve in Whanganui for example and act at a distance. I think again it is the sort of thing that the select committee will want to take a good long hard look at.  
There were as I say other provisions that caused some concern to members on this side of the House. The Minister mentioned in her speech increased powers relating to strip-searches.  
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: When I was speaking before the dinner break I was making the point that under the bill there are increased powers in respect of the use of strip-searches searches of prison cells opening inmates’ mail and submitting to drug and alcohol tests. I was making the point that Labour members will want to be assured at the select committee should the matter get to that phase that there are sufficient safeguards in regard to those powers because as we know necessary powers may be conferred but there always have to be adequate protections when they are in existence. It is particularly important to make this point because the regulatory impact statement notes that permitting mandatory strip-searches is likely to result in only a small increase in such searches. The Ministry of Maori Development objected to the proposal’s inclusion because it felt there was not a compelling case for the change. Indeed the Minister conceded in her speech that there was unlikely to be much of a call on this power. She noted that there had actually been a decrease in drug and alcohol use in prisons so it is going to be incumbent on the Government to justify those provisions.  
I said earlier in my speech that this bill contained a mix of some reasonable provisions some questionable provisions and one or two provisions that we had major problems with. The one or two provisions that I want to deal with in conclusion are those provisions. Labour does not believe that core State responsibilities currently discharged only by the chief executive of the department and his staff should be delegated to contractors and their staff operating private prisons. This is especially the case when it comes to core State functions such as deciding to change the security classification of an inmate or the temporary removal or release of inmates from prisons. Those powers—the power to decide whether a person is minimum security maximum security or otherwise and whether he or she should be able to get out of jail for a period of time—are powers that are fundamentally appropriate to be exercised by the State through an employee of the State the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections subject to all the accountabilities that we know of—accountable to the Minister who is accountable to this House; accountable to the State Services Commissioner when something goes wrong instead of to the as yet untested accountabilities that apply when the private sector is conducting powers and functions under this Act.  
This is the power that really concerns me. Extending the ability of a State sector employee to grant delegations outside the State sector is virtually unprecedented in our law. This is the first time that I can think of where there is a legal context where it is proposed to do that. Where it is being done without the protections that I described—and without the Official Information Act without the oversight of the watchdogs that apply to the Department of Corrections—then we should be very concerned indeed.  
Labour believes and has always believed that the running of our prisons the responsibility for that lies with the State because corrections is one of the core functions of Government. The Government has a moral and a fiscal responsibility to taxpayers to rehabilitate prisoners because the safety of the community depends on it. It is inappropriate fundamentally to delegate this responsibility to an entity that is driven by profit and that therefore benefits from an increase in the prison population. For goodness’ sake if we have learnt nothing else from the Californian experience—and it would appear that we have not learnt much given that we passed a three-strikes law in the last Parliament—we should have learnt at least that. The proposal to delegate powers that should remain with the State especially without safeguards around the delegations is the chief reason why the Labour Party will be opposing this amendment bill.