Robson Matt: Corrections Bill — Third Reading 
Robson Matt: Corrections Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:13347] 
Hon MATT ROBSON (Deputy Leader—Progressive) 
: 
 I rise to speak in the third reading debate on the Corrections Bill which will replace the 50-year-old Penal Institutions Act and bring the legislation governing prisons into the 21st century. As the former Minister of Corrections during the 46th Parliament I continued the process begun by National Ministers Nick Smith and the Hon Clem Simich that led to this bill being introduced to the House soon after the 2002 election. The bill deals with how we take offenders and rehabilitate them if we can. However the Department of Corrections is but one part of the offending cycle. If we can intervene much earlier in a person’s life we have a greater chance that that person will never re-enter the corrections system. The Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters is one example of early intervention. It operates in 18 places throughout New Zealand. It is the brainchild of Lesley Max and the Pacific Foundation and is a home-based programme that helps parents to help their children with learning and success in education. I speak about it here because the methods of rehabilitation and of targeted intervention at an early age are the same principles that should be applied in the corrections system. That is what this bill takes up. 
Tutors in the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters work with both children and their parents to give those parents confidence with their children. At a low cost the programme turns potential criminals into confident children. Parents who have been in crime start to transform their lives. That supports the assertion that I made in the introduction to the 2001  
About Time 
 report: “We know the earliest possible intervention works best and costs the least. Working with a 5-year-old to change aggressive and defiant behaviour is estimated to cost $5000 and has a success rate of 70 percent. The same behaviour at age 20 costs $20000 and has a success rate of only 20 percent.” It is that 20 percent success rate that the corrections system is stuck with really. Those are the people who have not been able to be turned around at an early stage. The corrections system deals with the most difficult and most entrenched behaviours. 
The assertion made in the  
About Time 
 report is also borne out in one of the stories of a formerly criminal father who was turned into a supportive and responsible father for his own 5-year-old through the early intervention of the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters. I would urge member to read the book  
We Talk in our Family Now 
 and in particular to read the story of Gordon that father’s real name. Gordon’s life story ending in serious criminal offending epitomises the men who come into the corrections system. It outlines the individual dysfunctionalism that this bill with its rehabilitation and re-integration emphasis is designed to cope with. Hopefully the bill will enable the staff and service providers to change behaviour and to equip the individuals concerned with the skills to build successful lives once they are released from prison. Building successful lives means the prevention of victims. It means a chance for the children and families of inmates and it means safer communities. To understand the typical male inmate—the features are similar for the small number of women inmates but they also have separate deep-seated issues and traumatic backgrounds usually including domestic violence—Gordon’s story is worth reflecting upon especially by members who wish to deny that dealing with the environmental factors affecting inmates is any business of the Department of Corrections. 
Gordon stated: “I grew up in Otara. My own family was not a nice place for me. I don’t like talking about it. All I can say to you about it is I survived. By the time I was 14 I was hanging around with much older boys part of a gang. They used to beat me up. When I was 14 I got a letter saying I had a special exemption and I could leave school. I celebrated by drinking. I never went home after that and I never saw any of my family again until last year. At 14 I used to drink at the Star Hotel with the gang. Heaps of us were under age but nobody did anything about it. From there I guess you could say I spent 30 years as a delinquent—heaps of drugs heaps of crime. I think I started drinking at 14 and never really stopped until I was over 40. I had my first child when I was 14. His mum was 14 too. Her father came looking for me with all his Tongan friends. They wanted to get me and he reported me to the police. They wanted to charge me. I had seven children but Kupa was the only one I am bringing up. Kupa’s mum’s family was just like me—violent. Through HIPPY I learnt to appreciate him and take an interest in him. In a way I grew up with him. We did a lot of things through HIPPY that to him were natural. It was all new to me—like before HIPPY if I ever took him to the park I would just sit there and ignore him. Once we started HIPPY I would play with him in the park. At first when Kupa started to speak out more I thought HIPPY was bad for him. I thought: ‘What are they telling him?’ Before HIPPY I thought that kids should be seen and not heard and someone else should look after them. My parents never read to me or talked to me or played with me. All I ever got from them was a hiding. My mum only ever came to school if I was in trouble. Now I am a teacher of kohanga reo. I am part-way through a 4-year course. I know my whole whakapapa now on the Maori side and way back to a Scottish ancestor as well. The biggest difference HIPPY has made to us is that I am here at all. I am here for Kupa. My dream for Kupa: I don’t want him to lose his smile.” 
And to the sceptical Opposition members of Parliament who are still opposed to the rehabilitation and re-integration policies spelt out in this bill and being practised by the Department of Corrections I say they could do worse than to reflect on Leslie’s story in that book and on what changed her from a life of offending and therefore from passing on to her children the culture of offending. She stated: “I was a drug addict for 15 years. I was addicted to heroin and I used speed every day and I used to be on the methadone programme as well. All my three kids were born addicted to drugs. They screamed and screamed. The doctors had to give them opium to calm them down and wean them off. It was horrible. I had a baby every 3 years. I was in a series of violent relationships. Our life was chaotic. Everywhere it was arguing. I was always stressed and disorganised. It was HIPPY that changed things. I really loved it and I had to keep it together because someone was coming to my house once a week and then I had to go to meetings. The HIPPY tutor saved my life and my children’s life. HIPPY gave me tools. It empowered me. They showed me how to be grown up and how to put my children first.” 
We give the Department of Corrections the difficult task of dealing with people like Gordon and Leslie after they have offended. The point about this bill is that it is designed to be part of a whole system of saying we should work on people in the corrections system but we should also work on their minds at the earliest opportunities and transfer them to re-integration. A focus on punishment is the focus of the Opposition. But going to prison is the punishment. How do we punish someone like Gordon or Leslie more than that? Was it punishment that changed their lives? If we listen to the professionals whose work is reflected through this bill then we hear them say we must implement targeted intervention which the integrated offender managementpolicy practices and we must deal with the underlying causes. 
That is why it is important to actually understand the principles in clause 6 of this bill—and I do not think that Opposition members have actually read them. Clause 6(1) states: “(a) the maintenance of public safety is the paramount consideration in decisions about the management of persons under control or supervision: (b) victims’ interests must be considered in decisions related to the management of persons under control or supervision: (c) in order to reduce the risk of reoffending the cultural background ethnic identity and language of offenders must where appropriate and to the extent practicable within the resources available be taken into account … (ca) offenders must where appropriate and so far as is reasonable and practicable in the circumstances be provided with access to any process designed to promote restorative justice …”. Those are the principles and that is the pattern behind this bill which incorporates the best practices as observed over many years and practised by those who actually understand what they are talking about. 
As to the question of the Auckland Central Remand Prison that prison was the result of ideology all right. It was the result of the National Party washing its hands of responsibility for the social and environmental issues that cause offending. It got rid of the prison so it could turn it over to a private provider. The plan was to turn the whole prison system over to private providers. That ideology which sprang from the Richard Prebble – Roger Douglas period and the period of the National Government of the 1990s was one of actually ridding ourselves of all State-owned assets—something that New Zealand First at one stage said it was against. When most assets were gone the privateers looked elsewhere. One of the places it looked at was the prison system. That was nothing to do with having a better system or with rehabilitation and was all to do with profit. And the remand prison is a remand prison. It does not deal with long-term serious offenders. The whole gambit of offending has to be dealt with in the public system. 
The parts of the Auckland Central Remand Prison that are good can and will be transferred into the public system. I would like to ask those members who say that they have the confidence of Maori and that they have listened to Maori to actually go to the Maori focus units and talk to people like Mita Mohi who is a legend inside the prison system. I ask them to listen to the inmates who have gone through the Maori programmes and the Pacific programmes and then to say that nothing is being done. They should talk to all the iwi and runanga that have relationships with the prison. All that commendable work has been done by the present Government.