Davis KelvinKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I agree with the Prime Minister: prisons are a fiscal and moral failure. They are a fiscal failure because we spend close to $100000 a year to lock people up when we do not spend a fraction of that to keep people out of prisons. I agree with David Clendon as well when he said that the culture of prisons needs to change.People will be saying: Well what do you mean by 'The culture of prisons needs to change.'?". Last week I spent a good couple of hours with People at Risk Solutions (PARS) in Auckland and one of their workers said to me: "Kelvin of all the people who walk out of prison with a mental health issue in my professional estimation 40 percent of those mental health issues actually started in prison." This is not me just spouting something off; this is what I have heard from someone who works at the coalface: 40 percent of people who walk out of prison with a mental health issue actually had that mental health issue start in prison. That is an indictment of the system that we have.Not only that but we have 62 percent of prisoners come into prison who already have a mental health issue and we do very little to actually address that. That needs to change. Part of the reason probably that they commit crime is because of all the stuff that is going on in their head which they need to have addressed before they even get to prison. We need to start working with the education system the health system and the justice system to prevent those people coming in and not getting their mental health issues addressed.Our prison population grew in the last 2 years by 1500 people. The chief executive of Corrections says that he believes our prison population will level off at about 11000 in 8 years. Well if the prison population has grown by 1500 in the last 2 years and we keep that rate of growth up in 8 years we are actually going to have 6000 more people in prison. We will not have 11000; we are going to have 16000 at least because the prison population in December of last year hit 10000 for the first time ever.Prisons do not work. The more we build prisons then the more people we throw in prisons and then the more failure we create. Prisoners go out when their sentence is finally over. They do not get rehabilitated; they in fact go out and the vast majority end up reoffending within a couple of years which creates more victims in New Zealand. It is just a self-perpetuating cycle that we are creating here. We are not making New Zealand a safer country. We are not having fewer victims even though there is actually less crime and that is the really strange thing about our whole justice system.Another really interesting point that the PARS person said to me was: "Kelvin stop talking about rehabilitation." The reality is that we assume with rehabilitation that many of the prisoners were actually habilitated at some stage in their past—that they grew up in families like mine who were loving and caring and supportive and that they grew up with a set of values. The reality is that many of them have never been habilitated in the first place and when they get into prison we need to actually start from scratch teaching them the basic things that many of us take for granted. Prisons are a fiscal and moral failure. We cannot keep throwing in people at the number we are and at the speed we are and not do much to help them.Domestic violence in the annual review makes up a lot of the increase in prison population yet what are we doing for people who commit domestic or family violence? Do we actually engage the family in their rehabilitation or habilitation? If dad is in there because he has beaten up mum and the kids are the other family members actually brought in and is there some sort of healing done between dad and the family? And if he says "My offending is a result of my violent upbringing." do we bring in grandad and grandma as well and have this whole whānau / whole family healing to address the issue? No. Basically they go into prison and their courses are totally separate from the reality of their lives when they go back out. They have this teaching and training but there is actually a disconnect between their offending and the people they offended against if they are in there for domestic and family violence situations. That sort of thing needs to be looked at. We need to start looking at solutions to actually address the problem."