Davis Kelvin: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10675. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I will dedicate my 5 minutes to talking about the Department of Corrections. When we look at the annual review of the department where do we start? There is just a wealth of material to go on so let me start where it needs to start and that is with the Serco debacle. The Department of Corrections had a terrible year last year and Serco was the poster boy for incompetence and mismanagement.I remember walking down the main street of Kaikohe in 2009 or 2010—about that time—when the Government first mooted the idea of privatisation of prisons. I walked down the main street of Kaikohe with corrections officers from Ngāwhā prison. They said to me at the time: “This is going to be a disaster. Privatisation of prisons doesn’t work overseas. There are going to be more assaults prisoner on prisoner assaults. There are going to be more prisoner on staff assaults. There is going to be a whole heap of things covered up.” Let me tell you every single prediction they made was 100 percent accurate. In fact we could not have imagined that it would be worse but it certainly was.On 24 June last year we had the then Minister of Corrections in front of the Justice and Electoral Committee talking about the Estimates and even then he had his head in the sand. He was talking about what a great job Serco was doing saying that everything was fantastic it had been monitored and it was just swell. Within 7 months Serco was gone. Its contract was not going to be renewed. OK so it is still managing the prison for the next 12 months but basically all it is doing is just providing the staff to run Mt Eden Corrections Facility. The Department of Corrections has taken it over and so it should.Let me just remind everybody what the Minister who set up Serco said in 2010—and of course that Minister was Judith Collins. She stated in 2010: “Serco has a strong track record in managing prisons. I’m confident that the company will bring the high standards of professionalism safety rehabilitation and security expected by the Government to Mt Eden/ACRP.” Well are those not famous last words? Everything she said there has been totally wiped.Nothing that she said in terms of high standards of professionalism of safety of rehabilitation or of security measured up to what she said at that time. We have heard the story of contraband being brought in we have had the fight clubs—and the fight clubs have been videoed and put on Facebook. Everything was a disaster. And now that the “tough on crime” rhetoric is not working we are heading towards having a muster of 10000 people in our prisons before the end of next year. We start to wonder why it is that our muster is getting so high.Let us take a look at the programmes that they have in prisons but first of all—and I am reading from the annual report here at page 134 talking about the programmes—“The rates of some programmes reported are small and below the level of statistical significance;”. Imagine that: programmes in prisons are performing and getting results below the level of statistical significance. In other words they are not working. Then the report goes on to say: “however this does not necessarily mean that the particular programme has no impact on re-offending.” Of course a programme needs to help only one person to not reoffend out of all the hundreds of thousands who might attend the programme to say that it is having some positive effect. So that is just nonsense.The programmes have what they call a rehabilitation quotient and after a 12-month follow-up only one of the rehabilitation quotients when it comes to preventing reconvictions gets to double figures. There is one rehabilitation quotient for the reimprisonment of offenders and this is the Special Treatment Unit - Child Sex Offender programme. It has a rehabilitation quotient of minus 2.2. I thought well what does that actually mean? Because people will read the annual report and ask: “What do these figures actually say?”. I asked written questions of the Minister of Corrections: what does that figure of minus 2.2 mean in terms of offenders? How many offenders has it helped?