More horror stories of what is going on inside our new private prison empire…
Serco-run prison drops in performance table
The Department of Corrections took over the management of Mt Eden Prison from Serco in July after the allegations surfaced.
In the latest quarterly performance table published by the department, Mt Eden was the lowest ranked prison – based on the 12 months to June – after previously topping the tables for nearly two years.
View the table for Q4 2014/2015 on Corrections’ website (PDF, 69.5KB)
The department said the allegations of organised fights had been classified as a significant disorder event, which led to the performance downgrade.
Labour’s corrections spokesman Kelvin Davis said Mt Eden’s ranking had fallen in the blink of an eye, and he was concerned the government had not been getting all the facts until now.
Meanwhile, a draft report into the allegations has been completed but not released, after Serco went to court over it.
…note that SERCO is taking the Government to court to hide the damning report? How outrageous is that? We are sinking hundreds of millions into this right wing experiment, they are abusing prisoners and now we are having to pay legal fees to fight them to expose the truth???
It gets worse…
Ombudsman accuses Corrections of putting young lives at risk
The Corrections Department has been told it is putting the lives of teenage prisoners at risk by keeping them locked up for 23 hours a day in their cells at Mt Eden prison.
Prison inspections carried out by the Ombudsman have revealed about 70 teenagers are being held among adult prisoners and are allowed out of their cells for only about an hour a day.
…it’s not just our private prisons that are failing, the public ones are as well. How on earth can we put 16, 17, 18 and 19 year olds into an adult prison and lock them up for 23 hours a day? How can any benefit from that emerge?
It can’t, and if we were really honest with ourselves we would all privately acknowledge that we don’t put children into adult prisons to ‘help’ them, we do it to punish them and make them suffer.
Come on Nu Zilind, let’s be honest – we LOVE to see prisoners suffer. We love it. As an electorate we have allowed the mainstream media sensationalisation of crime to cloud our judgement by anger and we then allow that anger to be manipulated by politicians screaming ‘let’s get tough on crime’.
We don’t like to admit it because it asks hard questions about the ease with which we are manipulated and we loath having to think about anything more than rugby, beer and having the Prime Minister over for a BBQ.
Our incarceration rates are some of the highest in the world, our politicians love to manipulate our rage and the media get excited by labelling prisoners like the ‘Beast of Blenheim’.
We are a culture with all the social maturity of a day old can of coke and because incarceration mostly impacts Maori, we can be a tad racist about it all as well, that’s why the privatisation of prisons has been allowed to occur with so much ease because no one cares about prisoner welfare.
Key knew (thanks to David Farrar’s polling) that New Zealanders hate prisoners so when he claimed Labour were backing rapists and murderers he’d have the silent majority cheering like a drunk lynch mob.
National can’t back away from the private prison experiment because ACC is a share holder in the Wiri prison, which means we have a Government Department reliant on imprisonment for revenue – you can guess the implications that creates.
Which leads nicely to Whaleoil. We know Slater takes money from right wing lobby groups to spin their poison, so it’s interesting his pet reporter and former journalist (who left his job under a meth cloud), Stephen Cook has blogged using a TDB blogger as his ‘source’ (check the quotes and they are the same) to make a defence for Serco. Is Serco paying to have these sorts of blogs written?
If we want to look for solutions to our incarceration mentality we need to ask hard questions about the way we as voters have allowed our anger to be manipulated by a media more interested in creating heat than shedding light.
Corrections Minister Sam Lotu-Iiga yet again failed to front on RNZ this morning. Is he still in government and if so how does he justify his salary?
Truth is National know he is so awful they’ve hit the mute button, officially. Sad, really sad. And they know this bad news keeps giving, so like any dishonest undemocratic government, they hide.
He fronted this afternoon and his response to potential suicides was “Prisons are hard”…. He should resign.
National’s PR Team will be like, “Quick! More random pictures of happy people”, just like the drug companies do. I wouldn’t be surprised if National doesn’t bother to defend against the allegations, as Serco is their pet project.
Yep, Sam’s incompetency is astounding, but he is the fall guy for the national party leadership. So he will take the heat and maybe resign but in the end Serco will stay, cos that’s what Key and his cronies want.
The was an intriguing poll result reported by Q+A’s Corin Dann on Sunday.
He declared that a poll was taken on whether Kiwis believed we should mimic the Aussies and bung out any non-citizen with a year’s prison sentence.
According to him, the poll reported 75% or thereabouts in favour of taking that step.
I’m not sure if this clear majority believed that they were making some sort of semi-articulate attempt to get back at Australia (and bash a whole heap of other people as collateral damage) or whether they genuinely thought that the Aussies were on to something.
What do you think?
and all the while utterly missing that NZ has harsher conditions re: what will get you deported, than australia (we just go about it vastly better)
Sam lota liga,will not resign because it could cause a by election ,not what Key wants,so Sam is protected no matter how poorly he performs,as other poorly performing MPs are protected. and there are quite a few.
As @steve king says Sam is fall guy for National government, they can blame him but wont do anything about Serco.
Serco is a powerful US company ,Sam has no chance of doing anything against them. Sam wont be allowed to front up ,he might say the wrong thing, so like other people attached to National, he is hiding away on orders from Key , similar to Slaters lot .
Google> in what country was serco incorporated > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serco > U.K
You’re criticism of Sam is entirely valid, as are you’re comments about Corrections run prisons, which seem to be no better (perhaps worse) than their Serco run equivalents. Corrections is a tough portfolio; it’s time for someone with more ‘grunt’ to take it over. Judith Collins reprise?
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