Kedgley Sue: Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Kedgley Sue: Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8172. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I will speak briefly on the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill. The Green Party will be opposing it. It is an extraordinary bill. We have court cells to house the people who are being taken to court and suddenly these cells are to be used to house prisoners. 
Hon Member 
: Shock horror! 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: Well it is an indictment on the prison situation in New Zealand. I believe we have the second-highest number proportionally of prisoners locked up in jail of any nation in the world. We are second only to America. My understanding is that for every prisoner locked up for a year it costs $70000. We are all fretting about budgets but no one is worrying about that cost. We just keep pouring people into jails and it costs $70000 a year per prisoner. 
But the problem or the crisis facing the Government is where to put the endless number of prisoners who are going into our jails. Now we will take court cells which are normally used for people who are being taken to court for this purpose. The first question I have to ask is what will happen once they are all filled with our prisoners—and mark my words they will be. The bill talks about occasional use but this bill being rammed through under urgency will allow court cells to become de facto prisons. When our court cells are filled with prisoners where will the people who would be in those cells because they are being taken to court go? 
Hon Mita Ririnui 
: Caravans. 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: Will we now have caravans outside our courts in an attempt to house those people because all the court cells will be overflowing with prisoners? 
This bill is an absolute indictment on where we are in New Zealand with regard to this issue. Our prisons are overflowing but all we are doing is treating the symptoms and pouring more and more prisoners into jail when we should be looking at early intervention rehabilitation finding non-custodial interventions for minor non-violent offending and so on. We should be looking at rehabilitation and at the roots of crime. We know very well that the more unequal a society is the wider the gap between the rich and the poor. The more that we have entrenched poverty as we do in New Zealand the more violence will occur and the more we will have prisoners. So why do we not deal with the root causes of why we have the second-highest number of prisoners in jail in the world instead of resorting to these ludicrous situations such as turning our court cells into new jails? We will now have courts that are effectively jails. This is completely absurd. 
The bill also breaches the Resource Management Act. Normally we cannot just turn a court building into a prison because that would breach that Act. There would have to be a specific amendment or an allocation of land for the purpose of a prison. This bill will grant a Resource Management Act exemption so that nobody can challenge or even be consulted when a court building is to be effectively converted into a prison in his or her neighbourhood. People will wake up and find that the courthouse they have been living near will now effectively become a dual-purpose building—a prison and a court—and they will not be able to offer any objection because of the exemption in this bill. 
This is an indictment and the Green Party is horrified. I am certain that this bill will breach not just our human rights legislation but also international legislation. I would be grateful if the Minister of Corrections could confirm what human rights legislation the bill breaches and could tell members how the Government is planning to circumvent breaching that legislation. I ask where the Government will find room to accommodate the people who should be in the court cells and I ask what impact turning our courts into jails will have. What will we do when the court cells are all filled up? This is completely ludicrous. We have double-bunking and we have containers to house prisoners being erected around New Zealand. As some of the earlier speakers have said we have an absolute crisis that shows the absolute failure of our approach to reducing prison numbers. The number of prisoners is escalating. It shows the failure to deal with the root causes of the issue. It shows that this is the inevitable consequence of the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in New Zealand and the entrenched poverty we have. 
There is one other point that I keep mentioning and it is completely ignored. It is well established that if violence is screened continually on television as it is here it legitimises violence and encourages young boys in particular to think that the way to solve problems is through violence. The Green Party secured funding to do some research on this issue. Thousands of studies have confirmed the findings that prolonged exposure to incidents of violence on television normalises violence. Violence is shown in cartoons. There are up to 16 episodes of violence in an hour of cartoons. Violence is saturating our television and it is encouraging the normalisation of violence in our society. We are bringing up young men to think that violence is a legitimate way to solve conflict. Is this Parliament trying to do anything about that? Is it doing anything to reduce the amount of violence that pervades our television sets? It is one of the root causes of violence. Are we trying to do anything about that? No no; the two main political parties thump the anti-crime drum. Their members rush up and down the country. National and ACT in particular join with the Sensible Sentencing Trust in beating the anti-crime drum but they do absolutely nothing to reduce the causes of violence. A very simple cause of violence is the amount of violence shown on television. There are many ways we could be reducing the amount of violence shown on television. We could require that programmes that are filled with violence are screened only after 10 o’clock at night. We could be doing many things like that. But no we are not doing anything to address the root causes of violence. 
We are creating a society that is ever more unequal. We are entrenching poverty as the report yesterday pointed out. Then we worry and wonder why our prison population is out of control. It is one of the fastest-growing in the world—the second highest. What will we do next? We have turned the courts into prisons we have double-bunking in prisons and we have containers around the nation for prisoners. When will this Government and this Parliament address the root causes and look at the whole issue of rehabilitation early intervention and finding other ways to reduce the number of prisoners and the amount of crime in New Zealand?