Clendon David: Corrections Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Corrections Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 26 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8193. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I think the best thing one can say about this bill the Corrections Amendment Bill is that the title recognises that we are in dire need of amending our corrections system. At every level—at the legislative level at the policy level at the level of practice—we need some fundamental change. We need a comprehensive review an oversight of the legislation and the policy and the practice in our prisons. We need effectively a culture change in terms of both how we develop policy and legislation and how we implement that in our prisons. Sadly this bill does not go beyond the title in terms of effecting that real very necessary and much-needed change. This bill makes some minor tweaks it meddles around the edges and it achieves one or two beneficial outcomes but for the most part the outcome of the changes in this legislation will be negative. They will not serve the ends that the bill sets out to serve. They will be negative outcomes rather than positive ones. 
I just reference the chair of the Law and Order Committee who mentioned once again the benefits that would flow from this bill and I say again that the question must be raised: benefits for whom? It would seem clearly that the private sector will potentially benefit very much from the embedding of further provisions that enable and facilitate the entry of private sector operators into the corrections system. As we heard from Mr Goff Serco potentially will benefit to the tune of 30 million New Zealand taxpayers’ dollars each and every year after the opening of the white elephant at Wiri. 
Often one hears that the corrections system is in a state of crisis. Commentators often refer to the crisis in our prisons. I actually think that is the wrong language. “Crisis” suggests something sudden something unexpected something acute when actually what we have in our prisons is a chronic situation—a chronic condition of failure. That failure has been accelerating over at least the last 20 years. That chronic condition of failure is represented financially for example in the fact that we have seen something like a 250 percent increase in the amount of taxpayer money going into prisons over the last decade or so. In the early 2000s we had a corrections budget of some $460 million - odd a year. Last year it went close to $1.4 billion. That increased expenditure might be acceptable if we were seeing better social outcomes but equally we are failing there. We are not breaking the cycle of offending and reoffending. Up until a year or so ago the prison population was increasing dramatically. Failing—a chronic condition of failure. This bill does very little to deal with the key drivers of that failure or the reality of it. 
The advancement of this failure if you like—the decline in the well-being of our prisons the decline in the economic value of our prisons—has increased considerably due in part to what I have been thinking of more and more as an arms race. We saw this over a decade or so driven I think by this false perception of what has been called penal populism—that is the flawed idea that the public was demanding more and more serious and longer sentences the false perception that was created by organisations like the Sensible Sentencing Trust which is sensible in name only. The media were complicit in building this public perception that crime was on the increase in New Zealand that it was becoming more dangerous to be a New Zealander and that public safety was being degraded. None of that in fact was true. None of the evidence supports that penal populism which drove policy in a very unfortunate direction for at least a decade. 
I would like to refer to a speech made just a few nights ago by Kim Workman director of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment project director of the Robson Hanan Trust and a well-respected person with an extraordinary depth and breadth of experience in corrections. In his speech he set out by saying he “would consider the idea that ‘the wellbeing of a nation is measured not by the absence of disorder but by the presence of justice.’ ” It is very hard to see that we have improved or enhanced the delivery of justice in New Zealand over the last decade or more when one considers as one indicator the number of people we lock away in our prisons every year. In the late 1980s things began to go very wrong. In 1987 we locked up about 91 out of every 100000 New Zealanders. By 2009 that number had increased to 200 per 100000 of population—200 out of every 100000 New Zealanders by 2009 were being put in prison. It has dropped marginally now. We are down to about 194 per 100000 of population. We desperately need to address the root causes to ask ourselves why our prison population is exploding to this extent. This Corrections Amendment Bill sadly does little or nothing to address those core questions to provide any significant answers. To put that number 194—190 to 200 per 100000—in context we look at Germany where the number is 83; France where it is 102; and Australia where it is 130. We have long since caught up with Australia in terms of imprisoning people; we have well exceeded their numbers—not an achievement we should or could be proud of. With the numbers around 190 to 200 we are in company with countries like Moldova Slovakia Gabon and Namibia. This is probably not company that we would aspire to in terms of locking people away in our society rather than dealing with the root causes of crime and offending and finding better ways of breaking that cycle of offending. 
It gets worse. We imprison something like 700 Maori per 100000 of population—something like six times higher than the non-Maori rate. It is unacceptable that an ethnic minority our Treaty partner is being imprisoned at a rate something like six times that of the non-Maori population. Maori are remanded in custody at a rate something like 11 times higher than the non-Maori rate of remand in custody. We have to drill a little bit deeper than fiddling around the margins and talking about efficiency and effectiveness in delivering our prison services. We need to drill a lot deeper than that and address some of the root causes of these inequities. 
The point is routinely made that—in fact it ought to be routinely made. It is not well enough understood that in terms of the relationship between crime and the imprisonment rate nowhere in the world is there a linear cause and effect solid relationship between the imprisonment rate and the crime rate. The imprisonment rate is not a measure of the crime rate. It is a consequence of legislation of policy and of practice in our prisons and elsewhere. The longer people stay in prison the more likely they are to reoffend not less. 
The very late presentation of the endeavour to undo the mischief or what has been called the monumental stuff-up of the smoking ban has been addressed—the point was made by a Government speaker that the Opposition seemed to oppose the process by which that ban was imposed. I would have to say we are in very good company. We are alongside the High Court; Justice Gilbert called the ban “unlawful invalid and of no effect”. And yes a long-term inmate at Paremoremo prison has successfully taken the Government to court and won. That case is again to come before the court in a matter of a few days and the court will be confronted with legislation that raises two fundamental constitutional issues which Supplementary Order Paper 171 did: the question of the imposition of retrospective criminal liability which it effectively does impose and the removal of the right of access to court for a wrong that has been done by retrospectively changing the law. It is unacceptable. Whatever one’s views about the benefits or otherwise of reducing or eliminating smoking from prisons it is unacceptable for this House to accept that that process that illegal process should be allowed to stand—should be put right by a retrospective change put in at the last minute to a bill that was never intended to address such a situation. 
I would like to say that Mr Noam Chomsky has said: “The more privilege you have the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have the more responsibility you have.” We have in this House an absolute responsibility to make the corrections regime better. This bill does not achieve that. We will be opposing this. Thank you.