Sharples Pita: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sharples Pita: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8138. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES (Associate Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 I will take just a short call in the third reading of the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill; I want to clear up a couple of issues from my earlier speech. Many of us have spoken about innovation and the possibility of privatisation allowing for innovation. I made this point before. Mr Barker has spoken about the Maori focus units starting in Mangaroa Prison in Hastings. As I said earlier I had a role in that. In fact Peter Grant and I ended up in there making the final decisions about the form of that prison. It actually turned out to be not how we wanted it because the restrictions in being tied to the mainstream prison did not allow it to be free or to operate freely with its own rules custom and culture inside it. For example inmates were placed in the unit without even wanting to be there but just to fill it up because the main part of the prison was short of beds. Others were taken out of that focus unit after they had reformed and were put back into mainstream which was devastating for them in terms of what they had learnt and where they were travelling. The other one was case management. The whole idea of the focus unit was to put each inmate on a case management programme so that he could have an end goal leave with whanau out there to look after him and not return. Also the transfers that happened between prisons affected the unit. At the end of the day the recidivism rate was down only 7 percent; that drop should have been much more. 
That is why we are building this new Whare Oranga Ake. This is a State arm of the system but could quite clearly be a private prison as well. Maori who are talking about possibly taking over the contract of a full prison cannot do so at the moment under the State but they might be able to do it if privatisation was allowed. I have no problem with Maori doing that because at the moment things are getting worse. Over 50 percent of our prison population are Maori so why not give Maori a chance to see whether they can actually do a better job of reforming those in prison just as we are looking for them to do so in education and other areas? In health Whanau Ora is now coming up with Maori working amongst our own people. I think it is really good because nothing will change unless the Maori people themselves feel like someone is leading them and there is an opportunity for them to actually get out of the situation that they are in. 
It is all about positiveness and that is why I believe privatisation will bring innovation. One example arose when I went to Fulham Correctional Centre in Australia. I did not know that it had an Aboriginal group and a Maori group who did a welcome for us—a kind of powhiri. We learnt afterwards that those two groups were at war with each other in that prison. There was conflict between the Aboriginal group and the Maori group and the prison tried that welcome to bring them together. At the end of the powhiri they were shaking hands and giving hugs. I checked up and they have quite a bond going now. They were able to do that; the private situation that I am talking about allows innovation. I have noticed flexibility with Maori in Dom Karauria’s prison here in Auckland City. He allowed different elders to come in and do things whereas in some prisons we have taken elders in they have had to go through the machine which is quite humiliating because they are the crème de la crème of Maori society. They have been stopped in the middle of a speech not allowed to have the food that consummates the occasion and things like that whereas in Dom’s prison he was able to say to the whole prison that tea would be late that day because of such and such. So they have that kind of flexibility. 
New Zealand prisons are so interrelated that what happens in one carries over into another and so on. In prisons any little change of practice can cause a riot. For example one day prisoners may be able to have beards and then the next day they are not allowed beards and there is trouble; it is really important that the prisoners know where they are at. I believe that the flexibility allowed in private prisons is worth a go and also that the opportunity for Maori to get in there and have a go at running them themselves is also worth trying. Thank you.