O'Connor Damien: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
O'Connor Damien: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:637;Page:7945] 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and to clarify a few facts that have been thrown into the Committee by the Opposition. I was interested to get a clear indication from Simon Power that the National Party policy of course will be to privatise the prisons in this country. I guess that follows on from its policies in the 1990s of privatising the railways attempting to privatise health and of course housing in the naive belief that that was going to deliver better services to New Zealand. 
I would just like to run through a few basic facts around the Department of Corrections because I think there is from time to time a misunderstanding and perhaps a lack of appreciation of the challenge that the department has. The prison muster or the number of people in prisons is currently over 7700. It is not a figure that we should be proud of but it is a reality that we have to manage on a day-to-day basis. We manage on a daily average over 26000 non-custodial sentences. We have a staff of over 5800 and we had an operating budget last year of $658 million compared with the last time the National Party was responsible—and I am sure it will not be for a long time yet—when there was a budget of $322 million. That is a huge investment in this area and one that this Government has taken full responsibility for. 
With such a huge responsibility and in such a difficult area of social responsibility no one could say that the system is perfect. No one could say that the system does not need improvements in some areas. As Minister I think it is important though to keep things in balance. Yes there were budget blowouts in the completion of four prisons on time built in one of the hottest building climates that this country has had for a long long time. In fact the State Services Commissioner in his report on the prison build situation stated that the fact that new facilities had been and will be completed on time was impressive. That is not to say that new projects will not have a greater level of scrutiny; we do learn from mistakes that have been made we acknowledge them and we move on. 
Simon Power referred to contraband issues within prisons. Yes we acknowledge those issues. They are part and parcel of the international challenge of running prisons. However compared with 1997 when over 28 percent of prisoners were identified as drug users within prisons we now have reduced that number back to 13 percent last year. That is a huge improvement in a key operation in the corrections system—that is trying to keep contraband out of our prisons. 
We have from time to time with such a large number of staff individuals who will not abide by our protocols procedures or indeed the law. We will identify—as we have done today—individuals who have not upheld the law within the prison system and we will deal with those issues. That does not mean to say there is widespread corruption or widespread abuse of procedures. We have to acknowledge the fact that for the most part corrections staff in a very difficult environment carry out a very good job in protecting New Zealanders from some very dangerous individuals. There will be from time to time as we have unfortunately seen some mistakes. As I say we have a responsibility to move on and to deal with those. 
I will not labour the issue here other than to say that we will be moving ahead in the next year in some key areas. We are employing another 200 probation officers on top of the over 600 we have at the moment to manage 68000 sentences on average that we manage in the community. Sixty-eight thousand is not a small number and even with the full complement of the 600-plus to 800 probation officers they have a challenging task that I have to acknowledge they do in a reasonably efficient and generally very safe way. 
I will just go over a few other key achievements in areas that we will be focusing on. We were focusing on these areas in the Department of Corrections last year and we will continue to do so. We have been expanding the alcohol and drug units within the prisons. We had two we opened one last year and we have committed to another three. This will provide 500 places for intensive drug and alcohol treatment within the prison system. That we believe will play a large part in trying to reduce reoffending over time. We have established specialist crime intelligence units within the prisons to gather information that might lead us to a planned escape as happened at Mount Eden Prison. That planned escape was thwarted because of intelligence gathered within the prison system and I applaud the success of that unit even though it has just been established. 
We have appointed a new investigation team to act immediately and to investigate any claims of inappropriate behaviour or corruption within the prison system. That investigation team will answer directly to the chief executive and I think it should reassure the public that if any accusation or claims are made we will move swiftly to clarify the situation. It is of course an environment where accusations can be made easily and it is important that we get to the truth of these accusations rather than be chasing around on wild-goose chases because some prisoner or prison officer has made some inappropriate allegation. That can happen. 
The member Simon Power referred to rehabilitation programmes. We have in fact revamped rehabilitation programmes and we are starting new rehabilitation programmes where it was identified that they were failing in their objective—that is to reduce reoffending and recidivism. We stopped those programmes the minute we found out that they were not working. We have revamped them and we are re-implementing them and we believe that they will do a very good job. 
We have appointed specialist reintegration teams made up of case workers who work directly with prisoners before they leave prison. So when prisoners go outside the wire—maybe on to probation on to parole under the probation service or on to other community sentences—we have people who are able to assist them with housing with relationship management and with making sure they get a bank account. This will enable them to reintegrate back into their families and into society. There are reintegration teams at every prison and they are starting to work very very well. 
Another area where there was some criticism of the department was where it was claimed that we did not have enough work opportunities or provide enough work for prisoners. We have moved to having a target of 60 percent of all prisoners being actively involved in work or training. We are moving up from our current 40 percent and through last year we have made significant improvements in that area. We now have 100 prisoners out on release to work—that is they go out to jobs and come back every day. All these initiatives help prisoners to reintegrate back into society and reduce the chances of their reoffending. 
Really in conclusion I do not accept the claim that the corrections system is failing. It has areas where we need to make changes and areas where we need to improve our performance—there is no doubt about that. But it is still doing a very good job in a very difficult environment managing over 7700 prisoners inside prison and over 68000 community sentences every year. That is a big challenge and I think on balance the department does a reasonable job. I look forward to making further improvements and making the changes that are necessary as we move forward into the next year.