Clendon David: Corrections Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Corrections Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7754. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 This bill the Corrections Amendment Bill represents essentially a missed opportunity. There is a great deal we need to do better and differently in corrections. A corrections amendment would be a very welcome thing. This bill succeeds with one or two provisions that will make a situation better around the margins but predominantly it represents a great leap backwards in a number of areas. It is a missed opportunity. It reflects a complete misunderstanding of the real needs of our corrections and justice sectors. It meddles around the margins. It is not a trivial matter given that last year we spent close to $1.4 billion on corrections. That figure has increased something like 2½ times in a decade. We cannot afford to throw money into a situation or into a model that is increasing human misery. It is not making our communities or our society safer and it is not getting anything like value for our taxpayer dollar. 
This bill makes some marginal changes around health care in prisons. There is a critical need to improve the health of the prison community. Typically the health status of inmates is much less good than that of the average population. I spoke recently to people who provide services to recently released prisoners and to parole prisoners and the stories are dreadful. People who have been incarcerated by the State for long periods are coming out with chronic untreated respiratory conditions and appalling dental health none of which is going to assist them in their rehabilitation or enable them to come back into society. The solution to that seems to be again to meddle around the margins. 
There was good work done by the Opposition parties at the Law and Order Committee to ensure that we have a reasonable guarantee of having at least one medical officer in each prison. The initial draft of the bill could have dropped that number to zero. There were some minor improvements there due to the Opposition but the reality is that this bill does nothing to address the fundamental issue of improving the health status of our inmates of our prisoners. 
The Ombudsman last year gave us a very compelling report insisting that the delivery of health services should not be a task for the custodial agency which primarily the Department of Corrections is but should be handed to an organisation that is primarily concerned with delivery of health services. That is compelling logic and we would encourage the Ombudsman’s recommendation to be picked up. 
One of our primary objections to this bill as has been said earlier is that it further embeds the privatisation and private management of our prisons. It creates this almost blanket authority for the chief executive to delegate through a chain of private managers contractors and subcontractors. We are reassured that this will not break the chain of accountability. One would have to be an awful optimist to think that three or four degrees of separation from the chief executive will not create a great deal of wriggle room when it comes to accountability when things go wrong as they inevitably will. For anybody who thinks our private managers in our prisons here will not get it wrong Mr Goff in his contribution earlier recounted some of the rather dismal achievements—or non-achievements—of Serco to date in New Zealand. It has a dreadful record in the UK not only in prison but also in the delivery of health services. It has not performed well in Australia. Why would we expect it to do any better here? Why are we investing—or should I say throwing away—$900 million on a new prison that will be managed privately? A fraction of that money spent differently spent better on breaking the cycle of offending and reoffending could completely remove the necessity of the extra capacity that will be provided in that prison. 
There are a number of things we could do today immediately without spending more money in fact through spending less. We could intervene in a meaningful way in drug and alcohol addiction which is rife in our prisons. We could intervene in a meaningful way by providing decent mental health services to our inmates both in the time they are in prison and when they are released from that prison. None of these things are simple or straightforward. They do require some spending some investment. But we could do it within existing budgets. We would remove the necessity to have this revolving door where we have something like 20000 people each year cycling through our prisons—in and out in and out through that revolving door. We could do a great deal better. We need to. This amendment bill takes us nowhere near to the place we need to go. The Greens will oppose it. Kia ora.