Clendon David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Clendon David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20395] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 If one was to assign a theme to this Budget it would be about austerity and about getting the best out of every dollar spent. It would be about cutting Government spending to the greatest extent possible. That makes it all the more extraordinary that this Government is proposing to spend over $1 billion—in fact over $1.1 billion—on what is effectively a failed model for corrections. A decade ago the Government’s vote on corrections was to the tune of $430 million. It has gone up some 250 percent in one decade and that sort of increase in what is a flawed failed mechanism is simply unsustainable. One wonders why we are perpetuating a completely failed mechanism. We are looking at something like $250000 of capital expenditure for every bed we provide in prisons. We are spending something like $93000 per year per head on each inmate in our prisons. This is a tragic waste of money and of human potential. It is a failed social experiment. 
That to his great credit has been recognised by none other than the Minister of Finance who is on record as calling prisons moral and fiscal failures and how very right he is. He is rightly concerned not only about the waste of money but also certainly about the moral issue of locking up people. There is an absolute commitment to a punitive approach to imprisonment. We are determined it seems to punish people—and more of them—by locking them away for longer periods. That is a moral failure as the Minister of Finance has quite rightly pointed out. The—shall we say—champion of this punitive approach Mr McVicar of the organisation that I refuse to dignify with the descriptor “sensible” referred to the Minister of Finance as having capitulated and waved the white flag. In fact that reference to a moral and fiscal failure was the first show of good common sense that we have seen from the Government. We hope that the Minister of Finance will assert his influence within the Government to get a changed approach. 
There have been minor changes. There have been some shifts but they are very minor. I think some of the improvements are in things like drug and alcohol treatment and literacy programmes. We can probably sheet that home to the co-leader of the Maori Party Pita Sharples who understands very well that the current “lock more of ’em up for longer” model is a failed mechanism. It is to his credit that he has achieved some small steps. But what is required is an absolute paradigm shift. Of that $1.1 billion something like $850 million will be spent on simply locking up people in concrete boxes. That is a primitive approach to corrections. It is unacceptable and we ought to move away from it. 
The Wiri Prison on which construction will begin once the tenders are signed will have $370 million spent on storing up more trouble for us further down the track. Over 1000 men will be accommodated in there. We will be putting in people largely for short sentences. They will come out no better off than they were when they went in. There will be no contribution to public safety or to the well-being of either inmates or society against which those people have offended. That $370 million represents something like 11 years of current expenditure on drug and alcohol rehabilitation and it is simply ludicrous to waste that sort of capital on mechanisms that we know will simply fail at a time when the country and the Government are capital-constrained. 
The Department of Corrections itself tells us that something like 83 percent of inmates have some sort of drug and alcohol problem. We know that some 80 percent of offending is in some way linked to alcohol drug or substance abuse and occurs when the offender is under the influence or comes from that sort of a background. Yet something like only 5 percent of sentenced prisoners are obliged to go through drug and alcohol abuse programmes. I do not criticise the judges for that; the programmes are simply not made available. We know that community-based programmes for alcohol and drug abuse treatment are significantly more successful and remarkably less expensive than prison-based activities yet we continue to spend and to waste money by putting it into corrections centres simply to hold people in cells rather than seeking to deal with the root problems.