Dean Jacqui: Corrections Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dean Jacqui: Corrections Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7742. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) 
: 
 I rise with pleasure to speak in the second reading of the Corrections Amendment Bill. Perhaps I will cover off some of the issues raised by the previous speaker Charles Chauvel. I think we have to just acknowledge and note that Labour is ideologically opposed to any kind of private management of the prison system. That is a given. It was a view expressed in the Law and Order Committee and it is no surprise to us. I guess you have to ask yourself why it is so ideologically opposed. If you reflect back to when Labour was in Government in 2008 and in the previous 9 years to that it left the corrections and criminal justice system in disarray. It was working in an environment where it was actually struggling with not only its criminal justice system but also with its corrections system. It lacked accountability. There was no focus in particular on victims. There was a critical shortage of prison beds. That was corrected by the Hon Judith Collins when she was Minister of Corrections and she brought in the double-bunking containers which actually if you have a look at them are a great solution. When the Law and Order Committee members were at Rimutaka Prison and we spoke to the prisoners in the containers they were happy with them. They were snug. They were warm. They felt safe. 
This is a Government that has faced up to the issues that it was left with by the previous Labour Government. So I guess it is no surprise that Labour was unable to face up to the challenges that it had while it was in Government. Gangs and organised crime were on the rise. The P problem was absolutely out of control and that Government had absolutely no answer to it. In contrast since National has been in power public confidence in the Department of Corrections is 53 percent higher than it was when this Government took the Treasury benches. That is 53 percent higher confidence in corrections so that is not a bad record. Positive random drug-tests were at a record low last year. They were down from 13 percent in 2008 to just 4 percent in the last financial year. Changes in this bill will make it even harder to get drugs into prison. 
I want to talk about strip-searching. We know that Labour is ideologically opposed and always will be to the possibility that anybody else can run a prison other than the Department of Corrections but the issue of strip-searching was one that our committee looked very carefully at and the provisions in this bill standardise the procedure of strip-searching. The reasons for doing that were many but I want to highlight just two. One of them is that a prisoner naturally does not look forward to the prospect of being strip-searched whether they are returning from work they have been to a court appearance or they are going into a high-dependency unit. Of course they do not and it is fair to say that corrections staff do not look forward to the procedure either. So there is a fair amount it would be fair to say of anxiety around the whole strip-searching procedure. The prisoner does not know the form of the strip-search at the moment. So it might be the very intrusive strip-search or it might be the less intrusive strip-search. They do not know which one it is to be. By standardising the search that uncertainty is ramped down just a few notches and the prisoner knows what they are going to face on their return to prison for whatever reason. 
The second reason is the nature of the strip-search. Using lights and mirrors so that the corrections officer can have a look at the areas he or she needs to look at places the distance between the officer and the prisoner. There is less physical contact and proximity between them which also serves to ramp down the tensions and anxiety for the prisoners and the corrections officers— 
Hon Phil Goff 
: That’s not what the corrections officers said. They said exactly the opposite. 
JACQUI DEAN 
: —and at the same time increases the safety. Oh well the member says “exactly the opposite” and I beg to differ. 
This bill is intended to reduce the barriers to effectiveness and efficiencies in prison. It does that. We received as the Minister of Corrections said some amendments set out in a draft Supplementary Order Paper which we looked at carefully throughout the course of our examination of this bill. Those included to allow the Department of Corrections “to require a phone company to provide it with the personal unlock codes or keys to SIM cards … within legislative parameters allowing prison managers to authorise non-custodial staff to read prisoners’ mail”. What that means is that the prison manager can appoint a staff member who has the appropriate training to read prisoners’ mail. That means that corrections staff do not have to go through that function thus releasing them for other duties. The amendments also stated: “requiring that drinking water being made available to prisoners be of a standard reasonably equivalent to that supplied to the public;”—and by the way that also supports provision in the bill of making waterboarding before a urine test a punishable action—and “requiring that any prisoner being segregated because of a risk of self-harm be strip-searched on admission to an At Risk Unit;”. You would think a prisoner who is at risk of self-harm is pretty upset and yes they are. It is also worth noting that we were told that a prisoner can do damage to themselves with a paper clip and have done so in the past. So it is necessary to do strip-searches at that time. The amendments further stated: “and allowing the department to keep recordings of prisoners’ phone calls for up to two years”—instead of 6 months—“before having to erase them except in some defined circumstances.” and that just aids the efficient running of our prison system. This was a good consideration of this bill in the second reading and I commend it to the House.