Faafoi Kris: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Faafoi Kris: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7839. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this bill the Corrections Amendment Bill. I think it is clause 26 that pertains to the change in regime for strip-searches. The chair of the Law and Order Committee has just mentioned that the change in regime to the more intrusive search becoming the standard search would ratchet down—I think the phrase used was—the tension between the inmates and the prison officers. I wanted to just have a look at the submission made by the Corrections Association to the Law and Order Committee because you would think the Government would try to listen to those people who go to work in our prisons every day and have to deal with the danger of dealing with these highly volatile inmates. Part of the intention of this bill is to make life in prisons a bit more efficient for the management of those prisons and safer for the staff but the Corrections Association in its submission states completely the opposite of what Jacqui Dean has purported to be the truth. In its submission to our Law and Order Committee it made it very clear that “Strip searches are carried out every day in prisons across New Zealand. To include such an invasive procedure like this CANZ believes it will result in an increase in staff assaults.” 
So here we have the chair of the Law and Order Committee praising this move to go to the more invasive strip-searches in our prisons going from two regimes to the one—using the lights and mirrors that are used in the regime that they want to make standard—and saying that it will make our prisons a safer place for our corrections officers to work in when the people who are doing this every day disagree with what the chair of the Law and Order Committee has just said. That is a question I certainly want to put to the Minister in the chair the Minister of Corrections. We have got submissions from people who are working at the coalface in these prisons—day to day they have to do these searches dangerous searches which I am pretty sure every member of this Parliament would not want to do every day—saying to us that if we make them do this every day we are going to increase the danger for them. I will read this again: “To include such an invasive procedure like this CANZ believes it will result in an increase in staff assaults.” I think it is a responsibility of this House and this Government to make those prisons as safe a place as they can possibly be for those people those corrections officers who have to carry out this work. 
That leads me to really what is the main reason the Labour Party opposes this bill—I think it is contained in clause 5—and that is the delegation of powers from the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to those staff who work in privately run prisons. We have one in Auckland at the moment and we know that one is planned by the Government to go at Wiri. The kinds of powers that we are talking about being delegated to those staff who work in private prisons are around things like the security classification of inmates and the temporary release of prisoners in those private prisons. We do have an ideological difference of opinion with the Government around who should be operating our prisons. We do not believe that it is the role of a profit-motivated company to be imprisoning people and to have responsibility over them. On this side of the House we believe that that is the role of the Government. We strongly oppose privatising prisons which is why we strongly oppose clause 5 in this bill. We believe that prison management which involves the taking away of people’s freedom locking them up and making sure that we can rehabilitate them to the best of the State’s ability is a core role of Government just like our defence forces and our police. It is in the best interests of our community and we believe that the Government has a moral and fiscal obligation to take the responsibility of making sure that it is the State that looks after corrections and imprisoning people. 
We are not alone in that. There were a number of submissions to the Law and Order Committee around that. One was from Rethinking Crime and Punishment and I will read it again for the benefit of the Committee. It said that “The incarceration of citizens their treatment within prison and rehabilitation throughout a prison sentence is in our view a primary function of the Government.” and we 100 percent agree with that. I think one of the concerns that we certainly share with Rethinking Crime and Punishment is its concern that when we give powers to private contractors in this area “… the Government is opening the door for misuse of power and corruption as the checks and balances that apply to government departments may not be passed through to private entities.” and it talks about examples of behaviour like this being evidenced in private corporations in the United States. Jacqui Dean in her speech also said that it is absolutely a given that we will oppose this bill on that ground and she is 100 percent right. We do not believe it is the place of private companies which at the end of the day have a profit motivation—the bottom line is the bottom line—to be making profits out of people whom we as a State judge and say should be locked up. In one perverse view it would be in those companies’ interests to keep them in there because those prisons will—as I think Charles Chauvel said in his second reading speech—end up becoming a sausage factory. They want inmates to be in their prisons because without inmates they do not have any business. 
I think I have said enough around the private management of prisons and I did want to move on to strip-searching again because I think that some of the arguments put forward by the chair of the Law and Order Committee just have not stacked up in terms of the Government’s support for changing the regime from the two searches to the one search. Within the select committee there was a fair amount of opposition to the change of regime for the strip-searches as well and funnily enough the Ombudsmen—who are looking very closely at the Government’s behaviour at the moment—expressed a strong opinion in their submission to the committee. Again reading from their submission to the committee they expressed “strong concerns about the amendment … of the Corrections Act which diminishes the safeguards against prisoners being strip searched unnecessarily or inappropriately and also removes the less intrusive type of strip search. We have previously stated that the existing requirements for strip searches provide a very good balance between the rights of the Department to manage its prisoners and the rights of the prisoners to not be subjected to unreasonable searches. In our view they do not need to be changed.” 
So if the Minister in the chair does take a call I would like her to give us her opinion as to why this Government is ignoring the calls of the Office of the Ombudsman. It is ignoring the calls of the Corrections Association which represents I think a majority of those corrections officers who work day to day in the situations that we are discussing in this Parliament tonight. That change in regime for strip-searches I believe is something of an attempt by the Government to look tough against prisoners and we have heard from Jacqui Dean that she quite likes the look of people getting locked up. I do not necessarily think that it is a good look for the Government so I want to hear from the Minister in the chair why the Government is ignoring that call from organisations like the Office of the Ombudsmen and people like the officers who are at the front line why it is making that move which corrections officers think will put them in danger. 
I want to also back up what the Hon Phil Goff said about our visit to Rimutaka Prison. It was a very useful visit by the Law and Order Committee and I thank the Minister for letting us do that because it did give us the opportunity to go and speak face to face with those corrections officers and ask them the question. I agree with what Phil Goff said because I too asked those officers whether they think it would make a material difference to them if they had the ability to have just one search—to have the more intrusive search—and they all said no. They echoed what was in that Corrections Association submission which was that in the end they thought that it was going to do more good than harm—more good than harm. So I hope the Minister in the chair does take a call and explain to all those corrections officers who have expressed their opinion in their submission as to why she is continuing to change that strip-search regime in the face of the opinions of people at the front line and people who have had a look at the policy ramifications of this who have said that this is not a good thing to do. 
We are opposing this bill on those two grounds and another one which we will probably take up some time on later and that is around a bit of a botch-up on the Government’s behalf and poor old Anne Tolley has to clean it up.