Davis Kelvin: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections FacilityText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections Facility[Sitting date: 09 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8699. 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. The decision not to renew Serco’s contract is an utter humiliation for the Government which is forcing through its privatisation of prisons agenda. This should have come as no surprise whatsoever to the Government in that it was warned many many years ago. In fact I remember walking down the main street of Kaikohe in about 2008 or 2009 with the corrections officers from Ngāwhā prison who were protesting against this very thing—the privatisation of prisons. They said to me at the time: “This is what’s going to happen. Any private company that gets hold of a prison contract is going to cut corners because the purpose of a private operator running a prison is to make money.” And I firmly believe that if a country or if a Government removes the liberty of somebody it should be the Government’s responsibility to rehabilitate those people and therefore the Government and the Department of Corrections should be running prisons. But this is what those men and women said to me. They said: “There are going to be staff cuts because that is the first way that a private company makes any money—by cutting the numbers of staff.” And when they cut the number of staff in a prison that means there are fewer staff to look over the prisoners and that is exactly what happened in Mt Eden Corrections Facility. That is the very reason that we have seen all the problems in Mt Eden prison from the very outset.Let me tell you a story: a prison guard from Serco in Mt Eden prison rang me anonymously when all this broke. This was after the fight clubs and everything came out. He rang me and he said: “Kelvin thank you very much for raising awareness with what you’re doing. I am a Serco prison guard.” He would not give me his name and his number did not show up on my phone. He said: “The reason all of these things are happening is because of the lack of staff numbers.” I said: “How do you get all this contraband? How do the prisoners get all this contraband into the prisons?”. He said: “Quite simply the guards bring it in.” I said: “Well how can that be? Because people when they visit the prison need to walk through the X-ray machine to check for contraband.” He said: “Well that’s fine. Visitors members of the public family members: when they come into the prison sure. We have staff there to watch them to make sure that we’re checking that they don’t bring contraband in such as cellphones and cigarettes and tobacco and all sorts such as weapons.” He said: “But because there are so few people we do not have the numbers to watch the staff members coming in.” So that is how—that is how—all the contraband gets into the prisons because of the low staff numbers.So I said to this guy: “What’s in it for a staff member to bring in contraband into a prison? What’s he or she going to get out of it?”. I said: “Why would they want to bring in a packet of cigarettes?”. He said: “Kelvin because a packet of cigarettes—a 20 pack of cigarettes—is worth $1000 on the inside.”—$1000. And if he or she is going to bring in one packet of cigarettes on their person into a prison and risk their job for $1000 they may as well risk it for $10000 and bring in 10 packets of cigarettes. That is the currency within the prison system and it was all enabled because of the staff cuts. The staff cuts are the biggest problem in Serco.I was not quite sure about this $1000 figure for a packet of cigarettes and I happened to speak to a former prisoner who had got out the very day before I spoke to him. I asked him: “Look I’ve heard an outrageous figure. The value of a packet of cigarettes—as far as you know what is the value of tobacco in prison?”. He said: “Well for a 50 gram packet of tobacco that’s worth $800.”—$800 for 50 grams of tobacco. I said: “How much is a cellphone worth?”. He said: “That is worth $1200.” I said: “Well how do these guards actually get reimbursed?”. Well it is quite simple. The inmates have the cellphones they just ring their gang associates outside and they say “Guard A he’s brought in 10 packets of cigarettes. Just drop a paper bag full of money off to his front door or under a park bench. We’ll arrange it.” That is how it happens. People say: “Well look these prisoners with cellphones—that’s outrageous.” But remember some people were arrested because they were organising a meth ring from inside Serco. That is how bad things got there—a meth ring was being organised from within Serco.But we should not be surprised because we knew about the reputation of Serco from the United Kingdom. I think it was some £60 million to £70 million it had to pay back to the United Kingdom Government in December 2012 I think it was because it had been charging the UK Government for work that it had not actually done. It was charging the UK Government for the monitoring of prisoners many of whom had already been returned back to prison and the rest or many of the others were in fact dead. So Serco was charging to monitor dead prisoners. That is the level of corruption that that company is guilty of—some £60 million to £70 million. That is the company that this Government has allowed into New Zealand to run Mt Eden and now Wiri prisons. But also we know about Serco’s reputation in terms of the running of detention centres in Australia. We all know that story about the abuses and about the mistreatment. I have seen it for myself and I have spoken face to face with people inside those detention centres. That is the same company that has mismanaged the Mt Eden Corrections Facility and now is mismanaging Wiri Prison.So we should not have been at all surprised that we got to where we are at but one thing that annoys me is that if it is so bad at Wiri Prison why is it that the Government is actually waiting some 14 months before it actually finally lets the axe fall on this company’s head? If it is that bad why should those prisoners still have to put up with Serco? Why does the axe not fall on its head right now right today? Well it is interesting that this is all coming up today on the last day of Parliament—very very interesting. Because the Minister of Corrections over there is going to say: “Look it’s not my problem anymore.” And the incoming Minister is going to say: “Well not on my watch.” But actually it was on her watch I have to say because Judith Collins was the Minister back in the day in 2009 who actually let the contract out for Serco to run Mt Eden prison. She is the one so she has to be brought in to sort the mess out that she started that she created. It is her problem. I feel sorry for Minister Lotu-Iiga. He was given a sentence of hard labour—he was given a sentence of hard labour. He was given the ministerial equivalent of breaking rocks with his forehead but he could not do anything—anything whatsoever—to fix the train wreck that was always going to happen that was Serco.Back on 24 June I think it was I said to the Minister: “Look I have heard these stories”—this was at the Law and Order Committee—“I have heard these stories about mistreatment about the people being thrown off balconies. I have heard all that.” His reply to me was: “You are hearing baseless misrepresentations.” Baseless representations—within 1 month we had the fight clubs coming out on video. It seems like nobody will believe anything a prisoner says until there is photographic evidence. It is almost like someone who is being thrown off a balcony has to take a selfie of themselves before they hit the ground before they will be believed. We actually have to be grateful to Serco for its lack of staffing because its lack of staffing meant that prisoners could get those cellphones in there and those cellphones are ultimately what brought Serco down. It actually shot itself in the foot. The thing is those walls that stop prisoners from escaping from prison actually stop scrutiny from going in and the only scrutiny we could get—the only way the prisoners’ stories could be believed—was by having that photographic and video evidence and we got it. And thank goodness for that. I was talking to that prisoner whom I spoke about before. He said to me that he was the bread monitor taking loaves of bread around to units in Mt Eden Corrections Facility. He said that the bread is brought in he takes it along on a trolley and one day one loaf happened to fall off the trolley. When it fell off it split open and what fell out was a cellphone. I said: “Crikey. What did you do with the cellphone?”. He goes: “Mate I just put it back in that loaf of bread put the loaf together put on it on the trolley and carried on and took it.” He said it was not worth his life to report the fact that people were getting the cellphones smuggled in through those loaves of bread.I will just talk about some of the deception around the whole Serco situation. Alex Littleton in February of this year was thrown off a balcony. We kicked up a bit of a stink about it and what happened was that the Department of Corrections came out with a press release saying that it was going to take the unusual step of speaking about this particular incident. It said that Alex Littleton fell down some steps after he was being chased by one prisoner. I have to ask: how does somebody fall down over a balcony especially a balcony that has been designed so that people do not fall over it? His story is completely different: he was not being chased by one person and he did not fall; he was being attacked by four people in his cell. When he saw one of these people pull out a shank—a shank is a homemade weapon; it could be a sharpened toothbrush; it could be a piece of metal that they have got from somewhere—he said he feared for his life. So he took off out of his cell and as he took off he was assaulted and he went flying over the balcony. He hit the ground some two or three metres below and he broke both his legs.Alex Littleton crawled to the guardhouse. That is a house with a glass window that the guard hides himself in basically. The guys who assaulted him ran down and started to kick him and beat him. It took some time before that guard eventually came out because that guard would have been fearful for his life as well. When there is only one guard on duty and he is looking over 40 to 50 prisoners. He is scared of getting out there and stopping a fight because he could be the person with the shank left inside of him at the end of the day. What annoys me and amazes me is the difference in the stories. The prisoner says four guys attacked him they had a shank they threw him over the balcony. Department of Corrections and Serco are saying: “No. No. He was chased by one guy and he fell down some steps.” I ask: where is the closed-circuit television footage? Here is an incident where closed-circuit television footage could actually clear up whose story was right but there is no closed-circuit television footage despite there being hundreds of closed-circuit televisions in a prison. Who is hiding what? It is outrageous to say that there is no closed-circuit television footage.I just want to finish with another story. This is from a father who visited his son. He said he had had to sit with his son that day looking at a guy at the next table with his arm in one of those metal frames with the pins into the bones above and below the elbow joint. “The psycho guy”—that he had spoken to his lawyer about the earlier Tuesday—“literally twisted his elbow joint until all the tendons popped because he would not do as he was told and fight another inmate in an in-house game called ‘contender’.” which we now know as fight clubs. He said: “This same guy has thrown two other inmates off an upper floor landing to the concrete below.” This email was dated 12 September 2014—long before I became the spokesperson for corrections long before I said to the Minister in select committee in June of this year that people were being thrown off balconies. The dropping and the throwing of people off balconies has been happening for quite some time and nobody has done anything about it whatsoever. We should not be surprised because we know that this is the track record of Serco. We know that it had a similar poor reputation in the United Kingdom we know that it has got a poor reputation in Australia we know now that it is hopeless here in New Zealand. Just because there are 10 kilometres separating Mt Eden from Wiri Prison it does not mean to say that the problems at Mt Eden are not just going to transfer themselves over to Wiri Prison. I am already hearing stories about things that are going wrong at Wiri Prison. This privatisation of prisons agenda has been an utter absolute shambles a fiasco and an embarrassment to the Government.