Ryall Tony: Corrections Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Procedure 
Ryall Tony: Corrections Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:617;Page:12985] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay of Plenty) 
: 
 During the Committee stage of the Families Commission Bill the Government removed the definition of “family” which has been incorporated into this bill and replaced it with a phrase that was in no way akin to this “psychological connection”. Mrs Collins has official paperwork on that and she will seek a call later on to remind the Minister in the chair Paul Swain that the Government has recognised that because of concerns previously expressed by this party “psychological connection” is too loose a definition and facilitates gang members being considered part of a family group. 
The Minister needs to know—and he may have forgotten—that there are at least 830 gang members in our nation’s prisons. The last head count had 289 each for Black Power and the Mongrel Mob and coming in at third 51 from the Nomads. So there are a significant number of gang members in prison. Mrs Collins will talk about the fact that because of her concern about the interpretation of “psychological connection” that definition of “family” was removed from the Families Commission Bill. The Minister should listen to that contribution because I think it will be important. 
Members on this side of the Chamber are particularly concerned about the Minister’s poor drafting of the purposes and principles of the corrections system. We think it fails to clearly reflect what the community expects from our prison system. The National Party considers that prisons work most effectively in two ways. The first is that they incapacitate criminals. We know that most crime is committed by a hard-core group of repeat offenders. By putting those people away we remove the opportunity for those offenders to commit further crimes. By taking them off the streets the justice system punishes the offender and protects and serves the community. That is not reflected in either the principles or purpose clauses of the bill. 
The second reason prison is effective is that it has an important role in deterring potential offenders from committing other crimes. Most people who may be contemplating for example a burglary a car theft or violence will weigh up the costs or benefits of their offending to some extent. Like any other money-making activity that requires some sort of rational calculation and the greater the risk of being caught and punished the less inclined people are to commit an offence. Again that basic precept—that tenet that makes prison effective—is not mentioned in this bill so National has moved a number of amendments to better reflect that. 
What is mentioned time and time again in the principles and purposes of the bill is the one function of prison about which there is greatest debate—that is rehabilitation. The debate has been going on for years about whether prisons rehabilitate. From the New Zealand experience it is clear that some programmes lower the reoffending rate but as a whole the reoffending rate of people released from prisons under this Labour Government is appalling. Forty percent of offenders released on parole will reoffend within 1 year of release; within 2 years 55 percent will reoffend; and within 5 years 86 percent of people will reoffend. So the question is whether that indicates rehabilitation. No it does not indicate rehabilitation. 
The Government is spending $43 million a year on that and frankly I think that is ineffective. What has been shown around the world to be effective is the use of prison work and study to better prisoners. Neither of those is mentioned at any length in the purposes and principles of the legislation. If the Government wants to promote rehabilitation one would have thought that the bill would back that up. Instead the bill is full of a whole lot of woolly stuff about rehabilitation being based on cultural background ethnic identity and the language and religion of the offender. None of that stuff is important in terms of the principles and purposes of the bill. 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 I want briefly to finish what I was saying before my previous 5 minutes’ call concluded. I was talking about the bill’s coverage of information sharing and I say most sincerely to the Minister—I plead with him—that the area in the Department of Corrections where information sharing needs to occur is in the department itself. Although we all know it is helpful to the community if the police are given information about offenders who will be paroled—be they dangerous people sexual predators or whatever—what is failing inside the Department of Corrections right now is that the very people who are designated sentence planners who write the reports and put together the rehabilitation programme that this bill puts into statutory law—the integrated offender management system—are also the jailers. 
There is a serious problem when a jailer feels that he or she can be intimidated or feels intimidated by an inmate. Will the jailer write a sentence plan that the inmate dislikes? Will the jailer write a report that goes on to the Parole Board—one that the offender dislikes? Not on your nelly! It is a fundamental fault and flaw to have the people who turn the keys responsible for writing the report that recommends whether an inmate should be paroled or released. It is a fundamental error. The keyholder needs to be totally separated from the responsibility of putting together the sentence plan and from the responsibility of writing reports to the Parole Board. What I know and what I am telling the Minister again—and today I was proven right; I have been proven right on everything I have brought to this Minister—is that the biggest problem with information sharing is within the Department of Corrections itself. The reason is that its processes are fundamentally flawed and this bill legislates them into being. That is what it does. 
I will deal with the notion of rehabilitation. I hope I have the time to read this: “The correctional rehabilitation ethic is a child of this century born with the rise of Progressive ideology and reform in the early decades growing strong with the development of social science in the thirties and forties reaching maturity in the fifties when the medical model was at its peak suffering a mid-life crisis and a loss of faith in the sixties and seventies and essentially gone and forgotten by the eighties. As we enter the nineties the rehabilitative ideal is showing signs of revival as some researchers employing a new technology called ‘meta-analysis’ believe they have detected life in the old body still. Were the rumours of the death of rehabilitation premature or is it time to give rehabilitation a decent burial and to consider a definition of penology without reference to ‘corrections?’ ”. This is an article from the United States written by some very learned gentlemen who would tell the Minister that rehabilitation does not work. I am sorry but the only inmate who will rehabilitate is the inmate who wants to. 
We are in a situation where we believe everything we are told. There are inmates who know that their one goal is to get out of jail and to get out as quickly as they can. They will sit there and say anything the sociologists want to hear. They will tell the sentence planner anything. There is a case of one released inmate who did five courses on anger management. He did the course five times so of course he puts the ticks in all the right boxes. When it comes time for parole it all looks good. One needs to sit with some inmates—those who are prepared to be honest and frank—and listen to the games they play. The situation has never been more evident than what is happening right now to female prison officers some of whom should never have been in the job in the first place because of being vulnerable to the manipulations of these people who have doctorates in manipulation. That is what got them into prison in the first place. These prisoners spend 24/7 figuring out how they can get over under and around the system. The whole country has been sucked into this idea of rehabilitation. We implemented rehabilitation based on spirituality and within the first month one of the people on the spirituality programme was murdered by another inmate on the programme who shoved a garden fork through his throat.