Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): The member for Invercargill who first spoke in this debate Sarah Dowie described this Government's performance in the justice sector as exceptional". I would actually agree with that. It has been exceptional particularly when I look at the annual review of the Department of Corrections—it is exceptionally poor. It is unprecedented in fact to the extent that we have seen an incredible increase in the number of inmates being kept in our prisons and that is recorded in the review. We are keeping more people in prison for longer without any increase in public safety and despite a reduction in the crime rate overall. There are more people being held on parole—something like 28 to 30 percent more—largely due to policy change not due to any risk profile or any other defensible reasons. There are more inmates failing to get parole; again not because of the level of risk they present to the community but simply because of process failures within Corrections. So I would agree that it has been an exceptional performance by this Government and it is an exceptionally poor performance. We need to do a great deal better.We are spending a great deal more money. The operating revenue for Corrections in the previous year was up some 5.5 percent. Despite that it still did not manage to meet its budget; there was an overspend. This is unsustainable. The Prime Minister knows it is unsustainable. He said as much some 4 or 5 years ago. Nothing has changed. We do need to do a great deal better. The prison muster is currently in excess of 10000. We are told I think in an attempt to comfort us by the chief executive officer (CEO) of Corrections that he thinks it will level off somewhere around 11000 inmates in the next 8 or 9 years. He cannot tell us when the levelling off might occur. I think it would be a disgrace for this country if in fact our prison population did level off at 10000 or something above that. We should be targeting something in the range of 3000 to 4000 as an acceptable—if that is the right word—number of inmates in our prisons. It certainly is unacceptable that we should accept in excess of 10000 people in our prisons.The response of this Government to this unprecedented rise has not been to interrogate its own policy or the practice in our prisons or the failure of rehabilitation and reintegration programmes; it is simply launching into a new bout of prison expansion—expansion of capacity. We heard from the CEO that it expects within the next 4 years to be able to accommodate another 1945 inmates in our prisons. This was presented as though it is some sort of success. Some of that is new capacity some of it is what he called "latent potential" which I think means reopening old units old prisons that were closed for very good humanitarian and operational reasons. This is not an acceptable response: spending more money less public safety more waste of people's time and effort in our prisons. It is not a good look for this Government.We know that the more people you have in a jail—particularly when they are double-bunked—the more people you have in a facility not designed for the number of inmates you get higher levels of stress higher levels of violence. We asked the CEO of Corrections directly whether the increased tension and stress of more people in a space beyond the design capacity was leading to more violent outbreaks and he certainly agreed that that was one reason why we are seeing more incidents of violence in our prisons. Again this is an unacceptable response. We can do a great deal better and in fact we will do a great deal better.I do think to be fair that a change in culture is called for and that is across not only the Corrections department but nationally as a country. We need a change of culture in the way we think and behave in terms of crime and punishment in our prisons. We need a cross-party agreement. We need over time to stop using law and order and particularly Corrections as a political football. We have been doing that for 20 or 30 years and we are failing to get good results. We are actually getting worse outcomes. We could go back as far as 1989 to the Roper report and look at some of the recommendations in that report. We do need a cross-party commitment to actually address the problems in our prisons in a modern way in a positive way with a view to dramatically reducing the social and economic cost of our prisons. Thank you."