Davis Kelvin: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s PerformanceText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s Performance[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5116. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau):I move That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. Let me say that the Serco fight club situation is an absolute debacle. It is a fiasco. It is a shambles. And it is an embarrassment not only for this Minister but also for the Government. It has been 3 years now that prisoners have been getting their lights punched out almost on a daily basis and this has gone on under the watch of Serco. There are so many issues wrong with Serco that it is actually difficult to know where to start but let us start with this: from the start Serco should never ever have been given the contract to run prisons in New Zealand. We believe that both the act of taking away someone’s liberty and their rehabilitation should always be the responsibility of the State.Not only that let us look at Serco’s record. Just in November-December 2013 that company was made to repay the United Kingdom Government £68 million because it was charging for work that it was not actually doing and that work was the watching over of inmates when they are rehabilitated into the community. What happened? I mean £68 million—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the member. I ask members who are leaving the Chamber to do so expeditiously. [Interruption] Order! For those please quieten down; it is difficult to hear the speaker.KELVIN DAVIS: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. That is not chicken feed £68 million. Over in the UK Serco was charging for work that it was not doing. It was charging for the monitoring of people who had been released into the community and the reality was that many of those people had actually been returned to prison. Secondly it was monitoring people who had actually passed away. This is not a company that can be relied upon. On top of that Serco was considered to be so unethical that the New Zealand Superannuation Fund refused to have it as part of its portfolio and that is because it owned a third of the shares in a company that makes nuclear warheads.Eighteen months ago Beven Hanlon of the Corrections Association raised issues around the fight club situation and in that time what has the Department of Corrections done about it? It has done absolutely nothing. It has sat on its hands. In fact it goes back beyond 18 months. It goes back to September 2012 at least when 3 News reported about Martin Lyttelton who was an inmate of Serco. He said that violence was rife especially in Auckland Central Remand Prison. “They were running fight clubs in the mainstream units”—this is in September 2012 and is a reference to the running of fight clubs in mainstream units at Mt Eden Corrections Facility. He goes on to say: “a lot of people were getting bashed up in that fight club-type scenario. In some cases the guards were actually sanctioning assaults by inmates on other inmates.” And what has happened in that time? They were waiting for some hard evidence. They sat on their hands until videos emerged on YouTube sent out via contraband smuggled into Serco. That shows that this company has been negligent at best.Then there is a report that was tabled on 9 July last year which actually covered all of these issues. It spoke about the fight club. Apparently this report is so bad that it makes for terrible reading. High-ranking corrections officials received that report and I ask the Minister to table that report which was tabled on 9 July last year and also the minutes of the meeting at which it was tabled so that we can see who the corrections officials were who received the copy so that we know who got it when they got it and what they did about it. Well we actually know what they did about it. They did absolutely nothing to the extent that we have seen in the fight club videos. Ray Smith the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections has admitted to hearing about the fight club but he said that he wanted hard evidence. He has got the evidence now in those YouTube videos but it makes me wonder: what about the black eyes? What about the bruises? What about the missing teeth? Were those not evidence of something going on at Mt Eden Corrections Facility? Why did he have to wait for the release of these videos?This raises the issue of whether those injuries sustained by prisoners were ever reported. You see in prisons if there is an incident guards will rush in and they will stop things and then they all write up their incident reports which go to make a combined report about the incident. Yet I can almost guarantee that there will not be any incident reports from Serco but that there will be medical records that have been kept of the injuries sustained by prisoners. It makes me wonder what the correlation is between the medical records and the incident reports. I would like to know whether the Minister can table the correlation between the medical records. We do not need to know the prisoners’ names; we just need to know the numbers. We need to know the injuries and we need to see whether the medical records that have been collected at Mt Eden Corrections Facility correlate with the number of incident reports. I can almost guarantee that that is not going to happen. A spokeswoman for Serco said on 24 November 2014: “we report every incident no matter how minor.” Well if that is the case there should be those incident reports that I have just spoken about and I would love to know—love to know—whether the number of incident reports and the number of medical reports actually correlate.There are allegations that prisoners with severe injuries have been transported out of Mt Eden Corrections Facility to other facilities such as Ngāwhā prison Manawatū Prison and Whanganui Prison. Why would anybody transfer an inmate with severe injuries? Let me tell you the story about one prisoner—prisoner Evans—who arrived at Ngāwhā prison the prison up in Northland with a punctured lung. He was in such bad shape that the guards at Ngāwhā prison transferred him almost immediately to Whangarei Hospital where he subsequently passed away—sorry it was not a punctured lung; it was a ruptured lung and there is a difference. A puncture is when something goes into you; a rupture is when it bursts from the outside. If you ask any doctor or nurse—anybody who is involved in medicine—how you get a rupture they will tell you that it often occurs in something like a high-speed accident such as a car crash. We have all heard of people rupturing their spleens in a car crash. Well this guy had a ruptured lung.I am told on good authority that there is a practice in Mt Eden Corrections Facility that is called “dropping” where prisoners—new prisoners usually—who walk into Mt Eden Corrections Facility are sized up by gangs are bashed up and for good measure are dropped off the balconies on to the concrete below. That is what happened to prisoner Evans. He was dropped off the balcony his lung was ruptured and then he was transferred out of Mt Eden Corrections Facility and sent north to Ngāwhā prison. I want to know at which prison Mt Eden or Ngāwhā that injury was recorded because I suspect that prisoners with injuries are being transported out of the Serco-run Mt Eden Corrections Facility so that the statistics do not reflect on Serco. Unfortunately prisoner Evans passed away. So people are dying because of Serco. We cannot underestimate the damage and the danger that is going on.Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: That’s untrue.KELVIN DAVIS: I hear the Minister say “That’s untrue.” Well it would be great to hear what he has got to say and it would be great to hear how he is going to stand up and justify how a prisoner can be transferred out of Mt Eden Corrections Facility with a ruptured lung only to arrive at Ngāwhā prison only to be transferred to Whangarei Hospital and then die within a couple of weeks. I know what he will say. He will say: “Oh the drugs didn’t work—the bacteria-resistant drugs.” Well how does that correlate with a ruptured lung? He should not have got a ruptured lung in the first place.At the end of May last year a prisoner arrived at Whanganui Prison. He was limping. Why was he limping? Because he had two broken legs—two broken legs. He was transferred out of Mt Eden Corrections Facility and he had been dropped off a landing as well. It was written up as a medical report but not reported as an incident report. We have people who are telling us these things and I know that this Government does not want to hear it. It does not want to know what is really going on because it reflects badly on the decision that it made to give Serco the contract. And like I say people are dying. I had four parents contact me on the weekend and they said that their sons who are in prison—and we know that they have committed crimes to get into prison—are saying: “Mum if we don’t get involved in the fight clubs we will get the bash.” That is the culture that is in the Serco-run prison at Mt Eden now.A prisoner was sent from Ngāwhā to Mt Eden—and he was intact by the way when he left Ngāwhā—and he came back 3 weeks later with a broken jaw. No record of the assault was made and there was no incident report but there should be a medical report that exists.Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: You’re making it up. You’re making it up.KELVIN DAVIS: And the Minister says that I am making it up. Obviously he has not spoken to the people who work for Serco and he has not spoken to the people who work for corrections facilities because these are people who are really concerned about the conditions that they work in and about the understaffing that is going on at Serco. They are telling us because they are scared. They do not want to tell the Minister of Corrections because they know that their jobs will be on the line as soon as they speak out because that is what happens to whistleblowers. It is not about doing what is right; it is about doing what is going to keep the Minister off their back and what is going to keep their jobs. It is a disgraceful situation with Serco.Here is another thing that I have been told. When prisons have audits an auditor will turn up at a prison unannounced and will demand on the day the things that they need to look at. I have it on good authority that Serco gets warned in advance. They get told by a high-ranking corrections official that—Hon Dr Nick Smith: Who told you that?KELVIN DAVIS: I will not tell you who told me because he will lose his job. They go in and Serco already knows what is going to be looked at and this is the very reason why Serco is getting such high rankings in the tables. It knows what is going to be audited before the auditors get there and it has everything—all the paperwork—ready. It is a disgrace.I just want to finish off with a letter from a man J B Kerwin. It was sent to me at 7 o’clock last night—7.23 p.m. It says: “Hello Mr Davis. In my circle of neighbours family etc. we don’t care what these individuals do to themselves in prison. Better there than bashing up innocent people when they’re at large. We say in general ‘Let them go for it.’ They are probably on remand for doing the same thing at home in the streets etc. Just let them be as obviously they are just doing what they are best at—violence. They’ll never likely be any different. Hopefully they’ll get put away. John Kerwin Whangarei.” I responded: “Dear John Kerwin. When they are released they’ll be even angrier and more violent. I would prefer that they were helped not to be violent. Maybe you or members of your family will be in their way one day when they get out. They will have honed their ability to hurt people but this is what you want. Good luck to you. Enjoy the community you will have helped to create. Kind regards Kelvin Davis MP for Te Tai Tokerau.”It is not just the community that the folks like John Kerwin of Whangarei have helped to create; it is the community that the people who run Serco and the people who have mismanaged corrections have helped to create because those people who are getting their lights bashed out now are going to return to our communities and we have to put up and live with the consequences of their behaviour and the culture that they have lived in while they have been at Mt Eden Corrections Facility.I would also like to know about the terms of reference for the review that is going on because the Minister says that the Ombudsman is able to look into it but the terms of reference are actually restricted to 3 months in advance. I would like to know whether or not the Ombudsman will be able to have a look at the report that was tabled on 9 July last year and see exactly what it said because we are going to request the report under the Official Information Act obviously and then it will be redacted but I want to know whether the Ombudsman is actually going to see the whole report and see the whole truth put out there. I have also got concerns about the review—that it is actually going to focus not on the behaviour of Serco but on the behaviour of the prisoners and the behaviour of Serco is going to be overshadowed by any sort of review of the prisoners’ behaviour such as the fighting and the contraband.