Sharples Pita: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sharples Pita: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8118. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES (Associate Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chairperson. I will take a call on the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill. To make it very clear I say that I am the Associate Minister of Corrections. I asked for the portfolio because I have spent a lot of my time since the 1970s working in prisons in New Zealand and Australia and I thought that maybe I could offer something to the prison service by being involved in that capacity as a Minister. There are good prisons and bad prisons in terms of their administration and treatment and of the duties they perform. I have found good prisons in a private capacity and also in a public capacity and poor prisons in both as well. 
I favour the introduction of private prisons in the sense that it can give Maori an opportunity to be more involved in looking after their own and perhaps rehabilitating them. The role of a prison in the first place is really to incarcerate people and to make the public safe. I believe that the role can be extended to rehabilitation but it needs a particular programme and culture within it in order to perform those tasks. 
A variety of Maori programmes have been introduced in prisons for ages. Mention has been made of the Maori focus units. The first one was in Hastings; I was one of the three people who designed that prison. It did not perform how we wanted it to and that is what I want to talk about. In New Zealand we have more prisons and more people in prison than we should have for our population. As a result the prisons are finding it difficult to cope so they are putting conditions on each other. There is a lot of interaction between prisons which stops the units from running in their own rights as single prisons. In the Maori focus units for example suddenly there may be no more beds left in the matua prison—the senior prison—so they put people into the Maori focus unit who do not want to be there sometimes who are not Maori and who do not fit into that programme. It erodes the value of the programme that is operating. There are other factors too but unless a programme is set up and is protected so that it can run in accord with why it has been set up then it is very difficult to carry on. 
My own preference is that we build more rehabilitation centres. We have designed some that we are hoping to launch next year. The value of the rehabilitation centres is that they will bring the recidivism rate down which doubles the amount of beds available. If there is a rehabilitation centre with 60 beds and we manage to keep most of those people out of prison that means that 60 beds are available in the main prison as well as in the rehabilitation centre because those people are not coming back. It is good to try. We have tried quite a few things in prison but it has been very difficult to maintain them. 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: But they’re not-for-profit aren’t they? The ones that work are not-for-profit. 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: I cannot answer that because I have seen rehabilitation centres run both in private prisons and in public prisons and I do not think that the profit thing needs to come into the equation myself. I think it is up to the manager. 
The member is right about Dom Karauria and the good job that he did at the Auckland Central Remand Prison but that came down to the manager and the freedom that he had to operate. He saw our P programme and he saw that P was a problem in his prison. He gave $13000 towards our P programme and he asked us to come into his prison and present to all of his staff. He made his entire staff except those few who were holding the keys at that moment observe the programme. At the end of it he stood up in front of them and said that he did not want to see any of them involved in P trafficking or helping to get P. He mentioned a guy who had left the week before who was sacked because he was involved in P and he said that he did not want to see it happening there. So I was pretty impressed with the prison that he ran. He also had a cultural arm at the prison which Peter White ran. He had elders in there by the dozen and those elders were able to interact. I am not saying that this cannot happen in a general prison but it is harder in New Zealand because of all the layers of culture that have happened in our prisons. 
During my first 3 years in Parliament sitting on that bench over there I noticed that quite a few Ministers of Corrections passed through. Corrections was regarded as the portfolio from hell. That was the korero. But you see it need not be like that if we are able to effect some change and some difference. Most of the people working in prisons are well motivated and I mean that having worked in that area since 1972. Also most of the inmates start on little offences like sleeping in a truck bay in town smashing a bus seat or something like that. It builds up to a welfare home then a low-security prison then a medium-security prison and then a maximum-security prison. 
I visited some private prisons in Australia. I thought they were pretty good because they had a case management system where every inmate had a personal case manager and every staff member had a number of inmates for whom he or she was responsible. That case management gave people an opportunity to aspire to privileges. They had a privilege system. The inmates would get more visits more leave and stuff like that depending on their behaviour and how they operated in the prison. I think that those sorts of things can come in more easily in a private prison than they can in the mainstream prison because our mainstream prisons are connected to each other. We might have to move people. We have a programme of trying to relocate inmates near to the town where they come from and that causes all sorts of complications as well. 
There is a case for private prisons. I think though that if we do that then we have to have a public debate. I think we have to look at things like security escape and so on and we have to make sure that people have had the chance to have that debate. We have to look at the human rights—the rights of inmates to appeal and to have their appeal heard properly. All of these things have to happen if we are to extend into the private capacity. At the end of the day I think we should try it because the way we are doing it now is not working despite really good attempts being made in the Department of Corrections.