Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17479] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I wish to speak in respect of Vote Corrections; a number of issues have raised their heads in the last 12 months in respect of this very volatile area of jurisdiction. A number of lessons have been learnt—thankfully—from some of the tragedies that have occurred in the Department of Corrections in the last couple of years. Obviously I am referring to the death of Liam Ashley and the murder of Karl Kuchenbecker by Mr Burton. I am pleased to see that a number of initiatives or processes have been put in place to ensure someone is watching because the lack of people watching in respect of Burton ranged across some Government departments but particularly the Community Probation Service. It was disappointing and embarrassing to read the coroner’s report and the attention that was drawn to failures in respect of process at the time leading up to Christmas when people took their eye off the ball people went on leave people were not checking their trays and people were not handing over vital information which resulted in this particularly abhorrent offender continuing to commit crimes—to stand over to rob and to threaten. That was all known by people within the Community Probation Service those supervising parole and it must be said a number of people within the New Zealand Police. 
In respect of Vote Corrections though I want to concentrate on a couple of areas. The first one is rehabilitation. People within the corrections system being available or open to rehabilitation is not something people like to know much about. People like to think of prisoners eating bread and water and doing precious little else. The fact is that in our society where we have such a high incarceration rate within our judicial system we know that people who are in jail will sooner or later get out of jail; they will come back into society. Surely the underpinning theme of anyone who goes to jail must be that they have to come out better than they went in. The fact is that within our judicial system we do not even try to do anything with those who most commonly are there for a period of under 2 years. 
The last time I visited a jail I talked to a chap who was in prison for a serious drug offence. It was the first time he had done a lag; he got 8 years for a drug-dealing offence. He was a fairly young father and he was obviously not amongst friends—he was absolutely scared stiff of being in jail. He had heard the cell door slam behind him and realised what he had lost and he wanted to do something about it. It was a serious offence and so he got 8 years yet he wanted from day one to do something about his drug problem. But because he was not eligible for parole until he had done two-thirds of his sentence—and good job—he was not eligible for anything else either. 
The vast majority of people in our prisons are in jail for 2 years or less and if they are in jail for 2 years or less they cannot get any help with rehabilitation. This is at a time when about 83 percent of people in our prisons are illiterate and innumerate or close to it yet we do nothing to assist them with literacy and numeracy. Around the same percentage—83 percent of people in our jails—have an alcohol or drug dependency yet we do nothing about them either if the length of time they are in jail is less than 2 years. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that we would just cast these people aside. We have to put our hand up and take responsibility for the fact that they are there and they will get out. We have a society to protect. Surely the primary task of a Government is to look after the safety and the security of its prisoners. 
Here is an opportunity. If things were in the right place if gangs were not running the prisons and if we had people with the willingness and charge to do so we could use effectively the period of time when these people are away from other influences. Some would say that rehabilitation does not work and it is true that some of the programmes that have been run over a number of years were found to be more conducive to recidivism than turning people away from offending. But it is a real tragedy to read for instance the comments of Ms Namana—in jail of course for killing “Lillybing”. She said that while she was in prison she had not been rehabilitated and she claimed that while she was there she had access to a range of drugs including pure methamphetamine and that she had a cellphone on which she downloaded pornography and developed gang associations. 
Another area I would like to discuss is community probation. We have a system in this country where people released on parole are released into the care of community probation officers. We have a terrible situation at the moment where about 40 percent of our community probation officers have less than 2 years’ experience yet every prisoner from the least offender to the most horrific offender will come out of jail and go into their care. We have seen—as I mentioned earlier—the results of failing to properly maintain and monitor people who are on parole for the most horrific of crimes. 
One of the jobs people within the community probation sector do is monitor community work projects and community-based sentences. The problem there is a complete lack of commitment to those community-based sentences because the offenders have no fear for instance of what prison may hold for them. In the year 2006-07—we do not have the figures for the current year—29 percent of people on a community-based sentence breached it then headed back to court for yet another sentence. Surely we need to get to a situation where people are offered all the help they can get and all the help they need to turn them away from the profits of their offending. We need to ensure that those left in charge of them have every ability resource and commitment to ensuring that those community-based sentences are in fact abided by and that their victims are protected by ensuring that they are living where they are supposed to be living that they are associating with those they are supposed to associate with that they are attending the counselling courses they should be—whether they relate to drug and alcohol or family violence offending—and making sure they are not creating more victims. 
But the problem is that with 29 percent of people breaching community-based sentences offenders tend to breach them at a time when they are committing more offences. The reason why they are happy to breach them is that they know that they are fronting on further charges and that there is no deterrent to not attending those community-based sentences. 
There is a hell of a lot of work to do within the Department of Corrections. A number of new prison beds have been provided for and as a result of the work of my colleague Simon Power in drawing attention to some of the deficiencies within the system the Government has moved—of course it had to move—to tighten up on some of those areas. But as long as people come out of jail in a worse state than when they went in and as long as people do not adhere to community-based sentences when we are putting more and more people on community-based sentences rather than putting them in prison we have two glaringly obvious areas for a lot of work to be done. It is time this Government woke up to that challenge. Thank you.