Franks Stephen: Corrections Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Corrections Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:617;Page:13150] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party in the debate on the title purposes and principles of the Corrections Bill. I have put forward two amendments both of which are intended to highlight the fact that the title “Corrections Bill” does not describe the bill at all. This bill is a triumph of the philosophy that Mr Robson has just demonstrated. He thought his most withering attack on those on the Opposition side of the Chamber might be that we were not really responsible for our malign opinions. Of course in the way that Government members approach almost everything in life—that no one is to be held accountable or responsible for anything—he decided to excuse all of us over here on the Opposition benches on the grounds that we might have been to boarding school. It is a slightly different theory from potty training and those other theories. 
Ron Mark 
: Didn’t Michael Cullen go to boarding school? 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: Dr Cullen did go to a private boys’ school. That may account for the absence from office now of the former Minister Matt Robson. 
The purposes and principles are set out in this bill. This bill very clearly reflects the ideology of those who have held the corrections portfolios since 1999. I may have missed some of them but this is really a Tariana Turia bill a Matt Robson bill and a Margaret Wilson bill. And now it is a Paul Swain bill. This bill goes into endless detail about elementary management practice and misses three of the four purposes of punishment. Those purposes are classically known. All the literature about imprisonment talks about protection or incapacitation. The bill states in perhaps one small provision that one of the purposes of punishment is the maintenance of public safety. It is possible that that is the way the Government refers to protection or incapacitation. Of course if one is on the Labour side of the Chamber it is very ugly to talk about “incapacitating” prisoners. Let us remember that Labour starts from the basis that if we are really nice to criminals they just may be nice back to us. “Incapacitation” is a word that would be far too direct and far too ugly to put into the bill so instead it uses the phrase “the maintenance of public safety”. 
The second recognised purpose of punishment is rehabilitation. That is usually seen as the very last purpose because it is very hard to achieve and because the other purposes must be achieved. Rehabilitation if we can get it is desirable but it has to come second third or fourth. Yet in this case the rest of the bill is all about rehabilitation. It contains nothing more about deterrence though every person who writes about punishment systems and prisons states that deterrence has to be one of the principal objectives and it has nothing about the price for the crime: denunciation. Punishment denunciation and the price for the crime—every culture expects its justice system to denounce crime to provide a price for crime and to make sure that the victim does not end up feeling that the criminal is better off after the crime. Yet this bill does not even record the need for denunciation. It makes denunciation illegitimate because it purports to be a comprehensive code. 
A sensible prison manager whom I met several years ago said that she would not recommend people for home detention because it was not fair on the victims as the prisoners looked forward to home detention so much that it was self-evident it was not a punishment. That prison manager reflected the normal common sense of every culture not the gobbledygook of the self-anointed elite that has taken control of our prisons—and in fact of our entire justice system—in the last 30 years. That manager had common sense yet nowhere in this massive bill do we see any reflection of the possibility that a sentence should denounce criminals and enable victims to feel that there was a price to be paid for committing crime. This bill expressly rules out the possibility of hard labour which 92 percent of New Zealanders voted for in the Withers referendum. Could anything be more direct than stating that what the Government calls “afflictive labour” is illegal? This bill makes solitary confinement which is one of the most humane forms of prison discipline only a management—