Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10512] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 The Minister asked the question: “Well how do you deal with people who are being released back into the community if they’re not on parole?”. The answer to that is: “You deal with them while they are in prison.” 
Every person who goes to prison has to come out of it in better nick than when he or she went in. We know that at the moment 8000 prisoners are inside our prisons. The Minister said that himself and he confirmed it. There are 44 drug and alcohol beds and 199 people are waiting for treatment in those beds. But no one is addressing the problem. We know that 83 percent of the 8000 people in our prisons have drug and alcohol problems. Funnily enough 83 percent of those people have literacy and numeracy problems as well. But you know people serving a sentence of less than 2 years under this lot over there cannot get any help with those problems—none whatsoever—and that keeps people on a cycle that has them going back to jail back to jail back to jail. 
In Wanganui a shoe factory was operating out of Kaitoke prison. It was put there funnily enough under the National Government which according to Mr O’Connor cocked up corrections well and truly in spite of the fact of course that Labour has been in Government for 14 of the last 22 years. Apparently anything that has ever gone wrong in corrections is National’s fault. Anyway a shoe factory was operating within the Kaitoke prison. The prison took 100 inmates a year the vast majority of whom had never worked. In 2003 that factory was closed down by Labour because it did not make a profit but what it did do was to save the taxpayers of New Zealand $5 million a year in unreturned prisoners. Anecdotally every one of those wardens at the Kaitoke prison who were involved in watching over the shoe factory said that none of the prisoners came back—none of them ever came back. 
This Government has spent $11 million on landscaping prisons. That is the big plus it can point to when it talks about what it has done around prisons. But members should look at the situation around the Liam Ashley debacle. Look at what happened there. The parents of this young man through a tough love arrangement said that yes they would allow him to go into prison overnight believing he would actually be safe within the care of the Department of Corrections under this Government. But where did he go? He went to the Auckland remand centre which had been privatised under National and which this Government accepted had a better record than any other State-run remand centres. He was put there at that centre run by the Department of Corrections and he died because he was locked up in a cage in a prison van with a guy who had murdered. He was chained to him and what do you know that guy beat the hell out of him. What do we ever hear from corrections about that? 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Damien didn’t even say sorry. 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: We did not hear that. We were told that the parents were apologised to but the parents say: “Oh funny—we don’t remember that; we don’t remember that at all.” 
Then within a few months we had the debacle around Graeme Burton which we mentioned earlier on. The fact is that this Government does not know how to “do” corrections. It stuffed up the budget. The sum of $500 million was set aside for four new prisons and that figure blew out to $890 million for only another 500 beds—a million bucks a bed. What did we find last year? Well we found that we gave $1.9 million in bonuses to the administrators of the Department of Corrections. And just this year so far over $1 million dollars has already been paid out to administrators within the department. The Minister himself has to accept that the department has never been run so badly because he cannot point to a single year under a National administration when there was stuff-up after stuff-up in corrections. 
Hon Damien O'Connor 
: Of course you can. 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: Well I ask the Minister to give us a year. The Minister can give us a year if he wants to but he can never point to a single year in corrections under our administration when corrections ever performed so badly—not one. I say to him: “The microphone is yours Minister. Take a call.”